• by Jonathan Blum , May 11, 2010

Get ready for the next wave in displays: the organic user interface. Organics will not be mere screens at all. They will carry their own intelligence, be able to find and connect to other nearby organic displays; they will quantify their place relative to users, bend to any shape or form and react to just about any physical parameter from heat to light to cold.

All in the pursuit of displaying information with never-before-seen ease or ubiquity.

"The organic display will live in the world as a normal thing does, without the distinction of it being a dedicated display," says Roel Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Ontario. He and his team are developing early prototypes of such organic interfaces. Vertegaal says these devices will be just like simple containers or furniture, except they will show vast amounts of  information. 

"This is the window and mouse; the basic tools of the fourth wave of computing," says Vertegaal.   In fact, his lab developed a working prototype for multisided independent display modules that could organize themselves into an active role-playing game board, all with no outside programming or pre-planning with the displays.

Vertegaal isn't the only one thinking like this. The MIT Media Lab's SixthSense project is developing a wearable gesture prototype that intergrates data into clothing and other dimensional objects.

And New York-based Perceptive Pixel is shipping sophisticated touch-enabled displays that show some early organic awareness of viewers. Remarkably, development for next-gen displays is actually a North American phenomenon. Ohio-based Kent Display is one of the largest flexible LCD manufacturing plants here in the U.S. And it provides next-gen technology to vendors like Fujitsu. 

"We really are at the beginning of the next generation of display," Kent president Joel Domino says.
However, those close to the actual production of organic human interfaces point out that there are many barriers ahead. Emerging technologies require investment to make them cheaper, more stable and easier to produce. And the world is having a hard enough time managing the current generation of displays.

"Right now we are focusing on getting the ebook readers flexible and to be functionable at average temperatures and at reasonable cost," says Doug Loy, director of technology at the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University. "There are many exciting prototypes out there for other things. But those are at least a five-year process with many bumps in the road."