Displays as a Material: A Route to Making Displays More Pervasive

For digital displays to become more pervasive, they need to have the properties of materials like textiles and plastic film. Moving away from the row-column addressing architecture that dominates traditional displays, the authors propose an architecture that relies on autonomous pixels - that is, pixels that independently sense input and convert it to a corresponding visual output. Two different prototypes reveal the challenges and potential of autonomous pixels, highlighting how digital displays supplied as a flexible material can help foster the development of various new applications. This department is part of a special issue on pervasive displays.