Minority Report is the first analogy that Rick Cope, CEO of NanoLumens, an Atlanta area LED systems maker, reaches for to describe what’s going on. “The desire is to have more visual media in more places,” he says.
Visual media is a better communicator than sound, he says, because it’s not constrained by language. It’s not constrained by much else, either, thanks to new designs that NanoLumens and a handful of other companies are coming up with. The five-year-old privately-held corporation designs and assembles patented, ultra-lightweight, Flex — as in highly flexible — LED displays that can be configured and mounted in ways you used to think of as limited to a bed sheet, making, in the company’s words, any wall, column, ceiling or window into a video display.
New Environments
“What’s been holding digital signage back is the need to conform the message to the display, like with LCD panels, or to have to adjust the lighting of the space around the needs of projection systems,” Cope explains. He says that highly flexible displays will move the notion of lighting-as-message into new areas and into new applications, from retail to entertainment. “It’s going to move it into areas that aren’t just advertising driven,” he predicts, citing uses such as managing traffic flow in stores and at events. “You’re using it not to push the product but to create the environment,” he says.
NanoLumens has their flexible displays in place at NASCAR Media Television Studios in Charlotte, NC and at Universal Studios in Orlando, FL, and it’s been used by event marketing firm the George P. Johnson Company for a Toyota campaign that draped the signage over the vehicles to essentially wrap them in the message.
The technology that Cope says sets his products apart from other flexible LED “blankets” — the company has 20 patents thus far covering aspects such as optics and substrates — is in the product’s thinness and its pixel pitch, which he says can have a resolution as tight as 3 millimeters, versus the 25mm to 50mm he’s seen on other products. He says that level of resolution is necessary to take the images completely to the edge of the display, to achieve informational immersion, and support the sense that the image or the message is truly without borders — a tough trick when you’re bending the display in ways that it’s not used to — yet, anyway.
OLEDs, introduced less than a decade ago commercially, offered the first promise of bendable lighting displays. But their limited scalability and high power consumption kept them from being very useful for either messaging or illumination on anything other than a small scale. Compare that to the 30-by-10-foot curved display that NanoLumens deployed on a stage at SXSW earlier this year, where the screen formed a concave curve around the back of a triangular stage platform, combining an architectural effect with an illumination effect.
Chris Gibbs, president of ExpoNation, which puts on the Digital Signage Expo trade show, was impressed. He says NanoLumen’s technology is at the edge of a trend that represents the next stage in display/illumination applications that includes such developments as LG’s recently-introduced transparent LCD-IPS screens, which make the display itself essentially transparent. All of these new technologies go one step further to delivering on Marshall McLuhan’s mandate that the medium becomes the message. As Gibbs expresses it, “the actual architecture of the display is becoming part of the message it’s being used to convey.”
Malleable Media
Just as we’ve become used to seeing video projection now seamlessly integrated into the overall lighting design of concerts and other live events, these new malleable messaging media will become attractive to lighting designers for certain types of projects. But they will also become irresistible to anyone with a message to get across, because they can be scaled beyond simply making them bigger: the delivery can range from subliminal to obvious, creating a kind of Z axis for messaging and for lighting, a kind of 3D without the screen.
The use of LED lighting will only become more pervasive and ubiquitous: average LED penetration in lighting was 1.4 percent in 2010 and is forecast to reach 9.3 percent in 2014, according to a DisplaySearch Quarterly LED Supply/Demand Market Forecast Report released in August. That same survey reports that total revenue for LED backlight and lighting applications was $7.2 billion in 2010 and is forecast to reach $12.7 billion in 2014, driven largely by government regulation but presumably by an advertising and marketing industry that’s realizing that light-driven messages can be remarkably effective. DispaySearch’s research further predicts that global LED capacity will reach 180 billion units, and by 2013 will reach 227 billion, which will continue to make LED-based systems more affordable and thus more widely accessible.
ExpoNation’s Chris Gibbs calls NanoLumen’s designs “the next wave of how lighting is used” beyond basic illumination. Cope says he’s taking the technology to architectural and industrial design shows, persuading those sectors that LED is a kind of fourth dimension that can be overlaid on the physical world. “The point is to allow ideas to become visual reality,” he says. “For years, lighting was stuck in a box; now, we’re breaking it out of that box.”
