Science and Entertainment are Coming Together

Abstract

PERCHED HIGH ON MOUNT LEE SITS THE ICONIC HOLLYWOOD Sign, which remains perhaps the most recognizable symbol of the entertainment industry. Originally erected in 1923 as a real estate advertisement, it has become an enduring icon of ambition and stardom. A couple of miles away is the Griffith Observatory, located on the southern slope of Mount Hollywood. While the sign evokes emotional excitement for all the great entertainment that has come out of the famous Hollywood studios, the observatory evokes a deep appreciation of how our scientific capabilities can lead to incredible educational experiences and inspire intellectual pursuits.

From its opening in 1935, Griffith Observatory was designed to help expand public education and access to astronomy. It has introduced millions of visitors to astronomy and physics, making it one of the most popular public telescopes in the world. Its Samuel Oschin Planetarium uses advanced digital projection to visualize cosmology, black holes, and planetary science in ways that make cutting-edge discoveries accessible to the public. Many astronomers and aerospace engineers have cited early visits to the observatory as sparking their interest in science. And so, we can see the magic of bringing our biggest industry event to the area that evokes the best in both visual entertainment and scientific exploration.

One of the reasons I love our electronic display industry is because of all the great visual experiences it enables as well as all the different fields of science and engineering that must converge to make our products work. As much as our enjoyment of great visual displays is a close and personal experience, sometimes our pursuit of the underlying discoveries to make them happen seem as distant and beyond reach as peering at the stars.

This year, our Display Week program will kick off in Los Angeles on May 3 with a full week of extraordinary events. One of the most famous and historic of these events is the SID International Technical Symposium, dating back to the beginning of the annual conference. This is where you can see the best research papers in more than a dozen categories presented by the best engineers and researchers in the industry. The inspiring contributors are figuratively the soldiers in the trenches, slowly advancing leading-edge advancements of our industry one important innovation at a time. The best of more than 1,000 submissions made it into the program this year, resulting in 450 oral and 250 poster presentations.

To help you navigate the incredible diversity of content, we present our preview and highlights article compiled by Lori Wilson with input from our great program subcommittee members. Gather your colleagues and use this guide to divide and conquer so you can cover all the aspects of the upcoming program.

I hope this feature persuades you to make your travel plans and submit your registration form early. While you are in LA, find some time to visit the Griffith Observatory. And on your way in or out of the site, gaze across the vista at the iconic Hollywood sign. I would love to see your pictures.

Our cover story introduces the winners of 2026 Honors and Awards. Each year, SID recognizes individuals making outstanding contributions to the field of displays and the work of our society. The feature article, compiled by Lori Wilson, introduces this year's honorees and illustrates the remarkable impact their work has had on the industry.

These awards celebrate a growing body of achievements in emissive technologies, such as OLEDs, miniLEDs, and microLEDs as well as extraordinary achievements in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) displays and optics. Among the winners are those who first led innovators in the LCD space and then brought their relentless efforts to bear on emissive displays. Special talent and vision enabled the inevitable marriage of quantum dots (QDs) and LEDs as well as the migration of high dynamic range techniques from large LCD direct-view displays to custom-tailored VR displays.

Business acumen with visionary leadership helped lead great teams of innovators. Vision science applied to make the VR display experience more realistic fit well with the rigorous work of display metrology, which needs to be enabled in both technology and organization. And as always, the industry is best served by professors and academics who enable the work of future generations.

These awards honor a lifetime's worth of ideas, challenges, setbacks, and inspirations. Every overnight success is enabled by decades of effort and countless hours of pushing through obstacles to achieve those magic moments of achievement. Please join me in congratulating this year's winners.

Leaning into the world of emissive displays, guest editors Jeff Yurek and ZhongSheng Luo helped secure two interesting Frontline Technology articles. The first, by Myoungjin Park and colleagues, focuses on the promising progress of inkjet-printed QD-LEDs. The second, by Mark Rejhon and Ian Khaw, characterizes the temporal performance of the latest displays. The inkjet printing of materials has long been an ambition of manufacturers because of its promise of reducing both raw material waste and capital costs. Some successful product launches have occurred, but it has yet to catch on as a mainstream approach. Maybe QD-LEDs will be the way into this market and become a standard process. For a thorough introduction, be sure to read the guest editorial.

Until recently, I was unaware of Rejhon's work around analyzing motion artifacts in modern displays. He has built an entire community interested in this work, along with reporting on his own research and creating various testing tools to analyze temporal display behavior. You can find them all on his website https://blurbusters.com/.

Ian Hendy is back with another Marketplace feature titled, “Gen 8 OLED Fabs, Economics, Technology, and Competitive Dynamics.” As the large-area OLED display space continues to grow and manufacturers are turning their focus to IT products, especially tablets and notebooks, the need for higher capacity, lower costs, and differentiated technology all point toward a massive ongoing investment in Gen 8 fabrication facilities. But there are a lot of critical choices to make before committing to a multibillion-dollar investment, and Ian has done an extraordinary job of breaking down all the options and potential implications. He knows the challenges and how to navigate them because it has literally been his job to do the math and break down all the technical and financial aspects into a manageable decision matrix. I am sure you will appreciate the effort he has invested in making it understandable for all of us. This was a fascinating read for me and one that I am sure I will look back at in the coming years to see how it holds up to our future outcomes.

Moving from future years back to just a couple of months ago, industry analyst Chris Chinnock attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and compiled a great review of all things display related. Yes, a lot of the focus involved cars, but not just because of the new ways to integrate displays into cars. Much of the attention also was on new display formats and technology options available for the cockpit. Notable advanced products were available in other spaces as well, including wearables and TVs. Chris's article includes some nice pictures that complement the text.

In our ID Asks installment, Sri sat down with Steven DenBaars, distinguished professor of materials and electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he also serves as director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency and codirector of the Solid State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center. “Pioneering the Light that Powers the Future of Industry and Academia” is an apt title for this column because DenBaars has an extensive body of work in compound semiconductors and their application to photonic and electronic devices, including microLEDs and lasers. He is ranked the eighth most-cited electrical engineer in the United States and 14th in the world for all his patents, publications, and presentations. His work has driven advances underpinning modern LED lighting, high-resolution display technology, ultraviolet light sources, and emerging optical communication systems, enabling brighter, more efficient, and longer-lasting energy technologies worldwide. We also learn that he is a man with some fun hobbies and a great appetite for the cultural varieties of the world. I am sure you will enjoy this interview as much as I did.

Our Pathways series is back, with author Chris Boylan providing an engaging profile of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology titled, “HKUST Helps to Shape the Future of Display Innovations.” Our connection to HKUST came through Professor Abhishek Srivastava, associate director of the Centre for Display Research at HKUST and an associate professor in the Electronics and Computer Engineering Department. But we also know him as the editor in chief of the Journal of the Society for Information Display. Abhishek and his students have recently been active in ferroelectric liquid crystals and applications to field-sequential displays, fast-switching lenses, and holographics. They are also actively investigating the physics of quantum rods (QRs), a close cousin to QDs but with some potential advantages that may enable a future QR-LED device. It was great to read about all the work and fun Abhishek and his students are having and to learn how many of his students have moved on to roles in well-known display manufacturers, where their foundation in research excellence is surely making an outsized impact on the industry. Congratulations one and all on your great work at HKUST!

Hopefully wherever you are, the weather is warming and spring is breaking through. We will all be together in LA in a couple short months. Make sure you make your travel plans early; I predict it is going to be a full house!