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LG quit the smartphone market back in 2021, but the tech giant still makes electronics components. At the LG Science Park in South Korea, the company showcased a working prototype of its newest stretchable screen.
Compared to the prototype the company demoed back in 2022, LG says that its new display technology can be expanded to up to 50 per cent and survive up to 10,000 stretches without any issues. Apart from stretching, the new display, dubbed Free-Form display can also be “freely transformed into any shape, such as stretching, folding, or twisting.”
The prototype in question is a 12-inch screen that can be stretched up to 18 inches with a pixel density of 100ppi. While this may look like a fairly high pixel density, most modern smartphones, even the budget ones have a pixel density of around 300ppi.
In a post on the LG Display website, the company said it used “special silicon substrates used in contact lenses” in conjunction with a micro-LED light source to maintain the image quality in varying temperatures.
For those wondering, stretchable screens are not only lightweight and thin but can also be glued to uneven surfaces like clothing or skin or used in wearables. The company also showcased a convex-shaped vehicle display that can be operated by hand with another use case showing a screen attached to a firefighter suit to display real-time information.
However, this is just a prototype at the moment, and it is highly unlikely that we will see stretchable screens in smartphones and wearables in the near future. However, this can be termed as a major engineering feat which gives us a glimpse of how display technology will improve in the coming years.
