Impactrum builds transparent, flexible LED panels that can be bent to the will of the imagination.
If you’ve been in any large city, you’ve seen LED video walls. Vegas, of course, is lousy with them. Now, visualize an LED panel that you can see through. And now visualize one you can bend. So what would a room be like that was all glass so you could see outside to say a park, and inside you were in the center of a 360-degree floor to ceiling transparent film filled with teeny-tiny and blindingly bright LEDs? Now imagine images of tigers leaping at you, or planets floating ion front of you, or skeletons dancing on the grass outside.
Korean-based Impactrum has been building LED displays and video walls for over 37 years and has 72 patents to prove it. The company has developed some clever display tricks like anti-aliasing a 4x resolution boast with a virtual pixel. They also developed a lens for each LED that gives them an amazing 6,000 nits (the brightest 4K TV available in late 2019 is 2,000 nit). And they do all that in a super light transparent sheet.
The company says they have also come up with a sub-division scanning system that eliminates all flickering, making animation possible indoors or out. One of the important patents the company has is a method of correcting the non-uniformity of LEDs which impacts the brightness and color purity. Impactrum has come up with a way to maintain the “white balance” of the overall images.
And they’ve figured out how to control light leakage, which brings us back to my fantasy of building an arcade-like AR room.
The company says their super micro 11,8,6 mm pixel pitch micro-LED film can even be cut with scissors to fit whatever area you need.
The price for the air clear film is approximately $900.00 per panel. There are a number of factors such as quantity and pitch size. The first panel being released will be the most popular at 11 mm.
The film uses a system controller that manages the content and then based on the number of panels, unit controllers are used. Common input interface is generally HDMI, DP, DVI-D, RS232C.
Impactrum is a US-based company incorporated in California. The company manufactures in Korea, and the U.S company’s CTO and Air Clear Film design engineers are Korean. Not all of the patented technologies listed on impactrumusa.com are realized within the Air Clear Film design. Those technologies are used within the company’s overall product offering of outdoor displays, media facade mesh and facade bars. On that site, there is also another series of products being released which are the Standio line which incorporates some of the listed technologies.
What do we think?
I recently gave a speech at The International Future Computing Summit where I was asked to opine about the future. One of my forecasts was everything will become a display.
Impactrum is going to contribute to that future vision. And, because there is some space between the LED pixels, which makes the screens transparent, there’s room to put in teeny tiny image sensors, which would add interactivity to the display.
And, since the more you can see, the more you can do (Jon Peddie 1992) when everything is a display, you will be able to do amazing things anywhere you are.
