A Summer Full of Reading to Enjoy

WELCOME EVERYONE TO THE MID-SUMMER SEASON AND OUR JULY/AUGUST issue of Information Display. We are back from an exciting Display Week in San Jose. It was great fun to be in Silicon Valley again and see so many friends and cherished colleagues doing the work of the Society as well as the work of our beloved industry. To each of you who offered so much support to our SID publications, thank you. I hope your conference experience was as rewarding as mine. In case you could not attend, this issue includes highlights of events, technologies, and discoveries from our reporting team. The next issue will feature the deep-dive coverage that is still being compiled. So, enjoy this small snack while we prepare the full meal for you.

In the meantime, I want to draw your attention to another very important topic: the SID Honors and Awards. These awards are the most prestigious individual recognition in our industry, and recent recipients have included both innovators and industry leaders, as well as a few Nobel Prize recipients.

Awardees are selected from a field of nominees identified and nominated by all of us who work in this industry. Everyone who has been recognized by these awards was nominated by someone just like you, who knew a great friend or colleague who met the qualifications of one of the many award categories available.

If you know of someone who should be recognized or maybe have wondered why they have not been so far, this is your opportunity. Visit the article in the SID News section and follow the link to nominate someone deserving. The nomination and submission processes are easy to follow and do not take much work, so please give this some thought as the deadline approaches. I would love to hear from the awards committee chair that they were inundated with great nominations thanks to my appeal in ID.

We have one of the largest mid-summer issues ever with six Frontline Technology articles and two guest editorials in addition to our regular features.

Our first guest editor is someone many of you know for her years of service on the program committee and now as the SID–Wiley Book Series editor. Susan Jones developed a great mix of articles illustrating how display technology can be employed to enable adjacent applications such as dynamic x-ray detection, antenna-on-display beamforming, and a stimulated brainwave display to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. As she explains in her editorial, “Once primarily visual interfaces, today's displays are emerging as pivotal components in broader system capabilities—extending into sensing, diagnostics, communication, and even therapeutic intervention.” I hope you enjoy her introduction of these articles and the creative ideas they convey.

Our second guest editor is Radu Sporea, associate professor of semiconductor devices at the University of Surrey. He is kicking off a series of articles exploring the multiple facets of backplane and thin-film transistor technology that may challenge our traditional assumptions of what can be achieved within some commonly presented characterizations. In his guest editorial, Radu explains that “…breakthroughs often emerge from unconventional thinking that tweaks and reimagines what is practical at the boundaries through process-device-circuit co-optimization.” The first article in this series—authored by Ian Hendy, Eva Bestelink, and Radu Sporea—starts at a relatively high level and is titled “New Options for Backplane Technology in the Display Industry.” I am sure you will enjoy this first installment and the rest of the upcoming series.

We also have a couple of great display characterization articles to round out our technical package. The first by Dale Stolitzka and his co-authors describes the Helmholtz–Kohlrausch (H–K) effect, which defines how we perceive the brightness of colors based on a combination of their luminance and saturation. Displays with more saturated colors enhance the perception of brightness without adding more luminance. “Modeling the HDR Display with XCR” is a follow-up to the concepts presented in Dale's 2023 ID article on the experienced color range (XCR) model (https://doi.org/10.1002/msid.1392), offering a more comprehensive explanation and a mathematical toolkit for the increased perceived brightness of displays with a wider chromaticity gamut.

We also welcome back frequent author Johan Bergquist. In “Hands-on Color Capability,” Johan explains how 3D color volume measurements and the associated representation with Gamut Rings is a great step forward in our understanding of wide color gamut and high dynamic range (HDR) displays. However, the data collection process is complex and can be error prone. He offers some thoughts on these challenges that can be overcome with the right tools and best practices. These two articles are a great read, and they fit together well to further our understanding and best practices of display measurement and characterization.

We are back again with an exciting installment of “ID Asks,” but this time we turn the tables on its kind and benevolent author, Sri Peruvemba. He agreed to tell us his story, describing his personal journey growing up, professional experiences, many SID achievements, and some of his hobbies and outside interests. This story was a collaboration among Radu Reit, me, and Sri. I am pleased that we were able to pull it together for this mid-summer installment. In the early fall, we will be releasing the third compilation of “ID Asks” profiles in electronic form. We will promote the link in the coming months.

“Pathways” is back with a virtual visit to Fuzhou University in Fujian, China, where author Chris Boylan describes their leading-edge research into emissive displays technology led by SID President-Elect Qun “Frank” Yan. Frank has a long tenure in emissive technology research and development going back to the days of plasma displays. Turning his focus to the promise of microLEDs, Frank is leading his students in the development of what they call highly integrated semiconductor information displays, or HISIDs. They believe that it has the promise “…to transform conventional screens into multifunctional, interactive information terminals. Rather than simply presenting static images, a HISID panel integrates display, sensing, communication, and computing directly within a microLED-based module.” We wish them much success with their work.

I would like to revisit a topic I have mentioned before: taking vacation or a sabbatical and having down-time, time off, or getting away. It is always hard to put down the laptop or tablet, turn off the screen, and shut off the TV. Information, including all that comes with our work, arrives faster and more urgent than ever before. The very technology we love has fulfilled its promise of giving us screens everywhere and in every form-factor imaginable, all pushing important (and not so important) information at us. They are irreplaceable, and yet there was a time when we lived without them. My experience is that a morning on my porch just watching a bird feeder or reading a printed book is a most relaxing and rejuvenating break. My appeal to you is to seek out opportunities to get offline. Wind down, rest, watch nature, and let some deadlines slip. Use this summer to rejuvenate your mind and get fresh inspiration for the seasons ahead. And with that conclusion, I wish you peace, rest, and renewal in the coming months.