A while back, I had the opportunity to visit the studio of San Francisco artist Christine Remy, who creates holographic portraits and LED sculptures. Much of her art is subtle and contemplative, however, she has two projects that I found striking and even emotionally jarring. One is a series of holographic portraits that are larger than life. The video doesn’t go into the details (and shows only one portrait), but the holographic series is composed of three-dimensional, animated images of a trio grieving women. As you move around the portraits, you get a different perspective of the women’s faces and their grief.
The other project is a persistence-of-vision piece in which a line of LEDs projects a life-sized image of a girl into air. It’s eerie because you can only catch glimpses of the girl out of the corner of your eye. Her presence if fleeting; it feels like you’re sharing the room with a ghost.
I kept the video short, trying to highlight as many projects as possible, but in doing so, I only touched on the wide range of Remy’s art, her motivation, and the technology behind it. If you’re interested in seeing more of her work, you can go to christineremyart.com. If you’re in San Francisco, I highly recommend a visit to her studio in the Mission District–the best way to experience her art is to see it in person.
(Updated 12:08 p.m. January 8, 2010 to include quantum dots as an upcoming display technology)
My survey of display tech, “The Hunt for the Perfect Screen,” was posted at Gizmodo a couple of weeks ago. It was a fun piece to write because it helped me see how much I’ve actually learned about screens like holographic systems, energy-efficient LCDs, bright and beautiful OLEDs, and lightweight plastic displays and their manufacturing. Most of it is fairly mind-blowing stuff. And it reminds me why I’m happy to be a technology reporter–I get to spend my time looking at the future.
The hardest part of writing the piece, unsurprisingly, was pruning the prose. There are a lot of specific technologies that I left out for the sake of flow and length. Below is a short list of topics that didn’t make it into the article.
Up-and-coming e-reader technologies such as MEMS devices (mirasol from Qualcomm) and electrowetting (from Liquavista, a spinout of Philips). I wrote a fairly comprehensive summary of future e-reader technologies for The Economist here.
Quantum dots–tiny nanocrystals that emit spectrally pure light–are being used to improve the efficiency of LCDs and could find their way in OLED screens down the road.
I plan to expand on some of these omitted topics in the future.
And now for a reporting outtake. Below is an anecdote on how a company I mentioned in the Giz article got its name.
On the naming of Phicot: The company that’s trying to commercialize HP’s plastic electronics manufacturing process is called Phicot. When I asked Carl Taussig of HP what Phicot means, he told that one of the researchers has a son who, when he was an infant, would pick up objects and call them all the same word, something that sounded like “phicot.” A toy truck? Phicot. A book? Phicot. A piece of food? Phicot. The parents started to worry about the child’s intelligence, says Taussig. But when the boy grew up and was able to enunciate better, they learned that he was simply saying, “Look what I’ve got.” Which is also something you might say to people if you have a display manufactured by the company. Cute.
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