It’s like something out of a Neal Stephenson novel, or possibly movies like Minority Report or Red Planet. A display which you can not only morph and twist, but which is barely thicker than a piece of paper. Yes, some pretty impressive developments have been making the rounds in the world of displays of late, most of which are coming to an electronics store near you!

Many of these products were displayed last year at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Samsung unveiled its revolutionary new AMOLED display on a number of items. AMOLED, which stands for active-matrix organic light-emitting diode, is a process where organic compounds are used to form the electroluminescent material while an active matrix takes care of pixelation and display.

The result is a display that can be twisted and shaped without fear of breaking the display, or ruining the picture quality. At CES, many of the displays came on hand-held devices, all of which boasted displays that were almost paper-thin and could be bent, hammered, and still maintain their picture. Check out the video below to see a few such items on display, which have since become commercially available, at least in some discerning sectors of the market.

But what is really exciting about this news is that it is not reserved to any one company. During 2011, virtually all technology firms with a hand in portable devices, laptops and tablets had their own ideas on new-age flexible displays that utilized AMOLED technology. Nokia has its own concept for the “Kinetic Device”, which it demonstrated at the Nokia World Conference in London this past September. This flexible phone is controlled not by touching the screen, but by manipulating the body itself. Check out this video of a demo of the Kinetic running Windows Phone OS.

Megagiants Sony, 3M and Microsoft are also on board, producing videos of products that are under development that utilize holographic technology, bendable displays, and all kinds of neat and futuristic concepts to produce the next great leap in gaming, personal computing, and communications. After viewing the majority of them, it seems clear that the future envisioned here will involve ultra-light, transparent devices that are extremely portable and merged with items we were on our person in the course of everyday life.

We can also expect things like windows and panes of glass to carry displays and interfaces as well, allowing people to get directions and access public databases just about anywhere. Consider the following video as an example of what’s in store. Not to left behind in the speculative department, Samsung produced this video of what they felt the future of tablets would look like:

You know the old saying, the truth is stranger than fiction? Well in this case, it seems the truth is catching up to the fiction. It’s nice when that happens, even if it comes a little bit later than expected. Now if someone would just invent a damn flying car already, we’d be in business!

Source: Huffington Post Tech