A 100-inch or larger super-sized Nano Transparent Screen(NTS) has been developed and commercialised for the first time in the world.
The technology has been developed by a team from the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM). The screen can adjust its transparency according to the environment and can be produced at a low cost, paving the way for the widespread adoption of large transparent screens, which until now have been prohibitively expensive.
The newly developed screen is expected to find applications across various products, such as transparent displays in department stores and supermarkets, smart windows for buildings, and versatile transparent displays suitable for both indoor and outdoor promotional uses.
The NTS developed by the KIMM is composed of a film as thin as a human hair, made by evenly dispersing titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles, with a diameter of 100 nanometers, inside the film. When light is emitted from the beam projector to the NTS, a very wide and clear image, at a viewing angle of 170 degrees, can be viewed together with the scenery beyond the transparent screen. Therefore, the video on the screen is visible to the viewers from every angle.
The NTS developed by the KIMM’s research team can be overlapped with a Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystal (PDLC) film. When the brightness of the ambient light requires adjustment or when detailed images need to be projected, the transparency of the PDLC film can be lowered to produce clearer images.
NTSs can be mass-produced through a roll-to-roll process, they can be supplied to the market at around 10 percent of the price of transparent OLED screens. These screens are also capable of producing clear images without loss of resolution by using the highest resolution beam projector. Additionally, the characteristics of NTS related to light rarely change in high and low temperature environments, making it possible to manufacture 100-in or larger transparent screens in the form of light-weighted and flexible films. Moreover, as NTSs are not affected by adverse weather conditions such as extreme cold or heat waves, these screens are suitable for indoor as well as outdoor installation.