 So we hear that SID display week and who are you? I'm Larry Weber, okay? I'm one of the old timers at SID. I started in the 60s working on plasma TVs. And in the 60s, yeah, and somehow or another, we, I survived all these years. And I've had a good time with SID. It was a former SID president and I'm just here for the excitement. Did you invent plasma? Well, no, I didn't invent it. I was actually a student of the professors that invented it. So I have a number of inventions, but my inventions were what made it practical in the later days. I didn't, when I first saw the thing, it was only a few pixels about that big. And I looked at it and my first impression was not very good. I thought this was probably going to be just some professor's pet project that would go nowhere. But I got to meet the professors and I got to love them and I wanted to work for them. And with that, I kept going and I was a survivor. And one of the things we did for plasma is one of the inventions I do have is I gave it the very high contrast ratio. And even though plasma's dead today, you look around us and you see a lot of very high contrast ratio displays with the deep dark. And the reason they have that is because they looked at the plasma and they saw the deep dark that it had and they said, well, that's the bar, is that high? We've got to be at least as good as that. And so even though plasma isn't here anymore, really almost the children of the standards that plasma put up are still all around us. So where were you doing that? Where did you study? Well, I was a professor at the University of Illinois. That's where the plasma display was invented. And I was doing intellectual property development. I had a number of patents and I had some very good patents, but I couldn't sell them because in the United States, the companies that were working on plasma, IBM, Texas Instruments, Control Data, all these companies, AT&T, in 1987, the last major one got out of the business. And so there was nothing to be had in the United States and there wasn't so much even in Asia. So I had to start a company and I went off and started a company that bought the world's largest plant for making plasma displays from IBM in 1987. And then we used that company and I came here many times to SID to show my displays. And I remember we showed our 21 inch monochrome displays here for the first time we showed our, that would have been in like maybe a 91 or so. We showed our color of a 21 inch color in, I think it was 94. And then in 1999, we showed our 60 inch full color and a lot of people said, oh, that's way too big. Okay, nobody will want a high definition display that says, but when people looked at it, they said, wow, this, why does this look so good? And they didn't understand that what was limiting most of the display quality was the eye. And so if you looked at a full, a high definition signal on a whatever it was, let's say a 36 inch CRT, it didn't look very good because the CRT was 10 feet away in the living room and your eye couldn't resolve it. But when you had a 60 inch in your living room, it really did. So that was a 720 feet display or 1999 or? It was 1999, it was a, yeah, it was a 720 line, I don't know, 1370, yeah, it was 13, essentially, yeah. So what's the company name? Plasmaco, Plasmaco. Now you won't find that name anymore because we sold the company to Panasonic in 96, okay? And then Panasonic took that to develop the world's largest plant for Plasma. Panasonic was the leading company for many years. But of course, Samsung and LG weren't too far behind. But again, they're not around anymore but they're a big part of the display industry. So what's Plasma? Plasma is just like a fluorescent lamp, okay? Except we've got millions of little fluorescent lamps. Each sub-pixel is a single fluorescent lamp that can be red, green, or blue. So it's an old technology in that sense but it's very good because it's emissive meaning is it radiates in all directions. Unlike the liquid crystal, which always has to struggle. The molecules, the very molecular nature of liquid crystals is they're directional. And that's very good for some things but it's hard to get a wide viewing angle with something that is inherently directional. Plasma doesn't have a backlight. It's fluorescent lamps. There's no backlight needed, okay? Because each little pixel is like the backlight, okay? It's like, I could say, millions of backlights. It's similar to OLED. OLED also doesn't need a backlight because it's an emissive display and it radiates pretty much in all directions, okay? So OLED is sort of, you might call it the follow-on to Plasma in that sense. But Plasma's made, it's quite different. Tiny small pixels, even in 1999, you had a million of them on a screen, right? Or something like that. Yeah, more than that, yeah, yeah. More than a million. How do you make sure that all of them are working? How does that work? Oh, well, you just have to be very good with your quality, okay? This is, all these technologies have a hard time with getting them all to work, okay? And the ones that didn't work, they're back in the lab, okay? There's lots of them. Oh, sure, well, initially there are, the first prototype, but if you get more than half of them to work, you might actually bring it to a show like SID, like here we are in the eye zone, and there's some displays, you'll see that don't look very good, but because of the way they're done, and they're a very significant advance, because most of these things, if you pour enough development money into them, you can get a good quality looking display. But the first ones never look very impressive, okay? But you don't want one dead pixel, even one doesn't look good on the screen. Well, that's right, that's right. Well, but you know, that's right. And especially at a show like SID here, where just about everybody is very, very critical, okay? One pixel is there, well, this technology isn't very good. I saw a dead pixel, you know, but it doesn't, it isn't quite so important to judge the whole technology. It just tells you what the maturity of it is, and how much more development you'll have to have. With Plasma, could you just push a little bit to the Plasma pixel and make it work again or something? No, no, no, there was a dead pixel, it was dead forever. Just throwing it out. Okay, well, you wouldn't, usually, in the early days, when we were the only technology that could make large screens, you know, long before liquid crystals could make large screens, and large means, let's say 60 inch, you would ship them with a few bad pixels, and the customers wouldn't mind for the most part, you know, because they wanted to get the latest new technology, they'd pay $10,000 for one of these things. The prices were very high when we had a corner on the market, and we needed that, because we were still losing money, selling them $10,000 a piece when you weren't selling very many. So it's just the way, you get mature after a while, and now there's no bad pixels, generally. So why did LCD win? Oh, well, I think there's a lot of reasons, but one reason is that the LCD had an advantage over the plasma in terms of the way they could be sold. Plasma started in 1971, we had our first products, which were a 12 inch diagonal, high resolution graphics display with 512 by 512 pixels. So we had a quarter million pixels. LCD was just, the Twisted Pneumatic was just invented the year before, in 1970, okay? So plasma was way ahead, but what liquid crystal could do is they could sell watch displays at a profit, okay? They could sell calculator displays at a profit, and so they could build up their industry step by step. They went to small TV displays next, and then they went to laptop kind of size displays, and then monitor displays, and so every step they could make some profit along the way. So plasma's problem is it came out in 1971, and that was before the laptop, not before the personal computer had come out, okay? So here we had a wonderful graphics display, but people didn't know what to do with graphics, okay? They didn't have software, they didn't have computers, and so we had to sort of, we were stalled there for a while, and we couldn't make any profit because there wasn't enough sales and all that. So we struggled, okay? And so one of the reasons liquid crystals has done so well is by, let's say, 1988, they had all sorts of infrastructure compared to plasma. So all the companies in, I'm sorry, 2014 is when plasma really died. The companies that were making plasma, Panasonic, LG, Samsung, Chong Hong, and China, they had much more investment in liquid crystals. So from a business standpoint, plasma didn't make any sense to them because they had 10 times the investment or more in liquid crystals. So from a business standpoint, every plasma they sold was a liquid crystal they didn't sell in terms of large TVs, and so what's the point of having this thing that steals from the technology where you put most of the investment in? So I think that was one of the factors, okay? But again, there's many factors. To do plasma for watches or for... Oh well, no, that doesn't make sense because the power requirement of the plasma was just didn't make that sense and that's why we didn't have watches and we didn't have, or you remember back when the liquid crystal watches started out there was LEDs. LEDs came out before the liquid crystal watches came out but then you remember you had the advertisement because you had to use two hands, you know, you had to use this hand with the watch on it and you had to have this hand to push on the LED button. So the advertisements for the liquid crystal guys said, well, now you can do it with one hand, you know? And so because the liquid crystal took so little power that the battery could last for a year or whatever the reasonable thing was whereas the liquid crystal battery only turned it on when you pushed the button because it took so much power. So plasma could have been done but it would have been as bad as the LED and so it just didn't make any sense, okay? There's a saying, and I think people are still saying that plasma quality is better than the LED. Well, that's right. What happens is, what happens, the way you tell that is there's a shootout that value electronics does every year and they do it in New York City now and what they'll do is they'll get the best liquid crystals, they'll get the best OLEDs and then they use the old Samsung plasma that was made back three years ago and they'll put them all next to each other and then they let video files, people that are really interested in video, they'll let them go and vote on them and say, well, and they'll look at all sorts of, they do like a three hour test of looking at all sorts of test patterns and discussing this and that and the Samsung plasma usually wins, okay? Even to the high quality of the OLEDs. Yeah, there's certain things that OLEDs are very good and liquid crystals are very good too. They're all, it's hard to tell now the difference between these, but if you look at all the features, for instance, one of the things plasma's still very good at is when you have a moving image, the plasma, because of its speed, it does not blur the image. The liquid crystal and even the OLED blur the image when you have an image that moves across the screen quickly. So if you leave it static or it doesn't move, then they all look very good, okay? But if you have it moving, it's tough, okay? And so- Were there any 4K plasmas? No, no, well I shouldn't say that. There were not as products, okay? Because we died in 14 before the 4K really happened. But NHK has an 8K plasma. 8K. 8K, which is 150 inches by the side. And so- How does it look like? It looks great. I mean, it's not a, it's a prototype, okay? So you have to go to Japan to see it, but they developed for the next, and so people say, oh, well plasma died because it couldn't do 4K. Well, if there, an 8K exists, all you gotta do is take the 8K and divide it in four. Now you've got four 4Ks. And you know, you're, so it can be done. It's just that for these other business reasons, the plasma didn't advance to that next stage. There's a saying that display technologies don't really die out, they might come back. Well, I doubt it because in plasma's case, the amount of investment that you would have to do. It's, for instance, in OLED, LG is making these beautiful, large screen televisions, which you can see, but Samsung doesn't do that yet, okay? And I have to ask, what's happening there? Well, it's a big investment you have to make in order to do that. So in order to get that big investment, you've gotta have certain special business conditions to exist, and I just don't see how plasma is going to overcome that because most of where plasma fits is in that large screen. You know, if we could make watch displays, if we could ever make the plasma low enough power so it was less than the liquid crystal, yeah, then you'd see it in some of those things. But it's not going to be back. I don't think. But there's some companies in the Silicon Valley that have big, famous names. They have so many billions of dollars in the bank. They could just put stuff and realize some of these awesome things you see here at the IZone, right? And just, isn't it sometimes when you're in a displayed business, just a question of cash, who's going to put the cash up and then it happens? Well, you need good technology, and you need cash, and you need luck, and you need good management, and you need a whole bunch of things, okay? So these things don't always come together, okay? And one of the things I learned in running my company is how important keeping the cash flowing in. And in order to do that, you have to have a very, very good story. And generally, the investors are very wary. In fact, the display industry is one of these things that loses a lot of money, okay? It's a very, display business is very, very tough. And here, you see the research and development people coming here at SID, and that's sort of the exciting part. But then the guy that has to actually put the money, he looks at all the companies that died off that didn't make money in displays. And then you look at how many companies are actually making money in displays today. And so, it's not a great picture in terms of what the results have been, but in terms of what displays have done for the world, when you have people in the countries where they have a hard time feeding themselves, but that they have to have their cell phone with their LCD display on it, you know? Because that's almost more important than the fundamental needs of life. That tells you that we've made a major impact in what we do here in the display industry. I'd like to say thanks a lot for all the displays. Absolutely. But how about LCD and OLED? Who's going to win? Oh, I think they'll both go against for a while, okay? I think LCD has shown some remarkable resilience in terms of giving the OLED some competition, but there are certain places where OLEDs work better than LCDs and other places where LCDs will be cheaper and have almost the same performance. Adding the quantum dot technology and stuff. That's right. That's one of the things that really helped the LCD. And... Keep adding stuff. But then there's the OLED, then there might be, you know, electroluminescent quantum dots, okay? So those, that might be a technology that'll come along and compete with the OLED a little bit, because it'll be emissive and it will be sort of like the OLED in the sense that it's a matrix display, but it can, you know, need a backlight. But on the other hand, it can give the great colors that the liquid crystals now are enjoying with the OLED. So all these things are going to continue to be around and I don't think any one of them is going to necessarily push out the other. They'll all find some place. Things are moving faster and faster in the industry and there's more and more volume shipped out. More and more people are buying more and more displays. Things are moving very fast. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's always exciting. Displays has always been an exciting area and I've seen it now for, you know, I've been a SID member since 1972. So I've been able to watch all this from the start from almost nothing to the point where it is. It's very, you know, it's fun for you. You can tell your wife and your kids. You can say, well, look at this. This is what I work on, you know, and it's exciting. And here at the iZone, are they one or two really exciting booths you've seen here? Yeah, well, you heard the people that just won the awards, okay? The headlamp that University of Stuttgart and the other people from Germany did is just spectacular and it's going to have a big effect, I think, on our safety for automobiles. Another one I like is the audio that was done over there for them. Okay, sure. So, because this iZone is really cool. It is. So, where's that? The sound. It's right here. Wait, so... No, no, no. Just go to the other side. Yeah. It's that one. Yeah, this one. So, you know, you want to, right? Right here? Right here. Hey. It's not there. It's here. Here. Here, right here. Yeah. There. Whoa. Now you're gonna hear some sound. The display isn't the important thing. Whoa, when I move on the side, it disappears. What the sound? That's amazing. It is amazing. So, do you think something like this is going to be everywhere? Is it going to be what? Everywhere. People are going to have... Well, I think for certain applications. I mean, obviously, if you want to, you know, everybody in the room to hear this, it's not going to work very well. Okay. Because he's standing behind it. He can't hear anything. There's no sound behind it. There's sound here, but over here, there's no sound. How does it work? How does it work? So, we have an ultrasonic-based technology. It puts out audio at an ultrasonic carrier frequency, and on top of that, we inject the sideband, and we use the air itself to create the sound right by your ears. That's amazing. So, do you need to have that kind of border on the screen? No, you don't need to have the border. This is a 3D-printed frame that we made in our lab. Doesn't have to have a thick border. The speaker can be very thin. As thin as 200 microns. And what's the quality? It sounds pretty good. The sound quality is good. The frequencies it covers are about 20 kilohertz, down to about 500 hertz. In that frequency range, the quality is very good. And we also have, one other thing is, we have stereo on this one pane of glass. Stereo. Stereo. So, there's an electrically isolated line here, and so that this half is one speaker, and this half is another speaker. And this produces a stereo sound. How does this compare with what LG is showing with there? LG's is quite different. They have a very thin OLED, and on the back of that, they've mounted a mechanical actuator that shakes the whole glass screen. You're not shaking it. Right behind. We have actually a glass with a thin film on top of it. And it's our thin film that's vibrating. Not the whole display, like theirs is. But we're here, we've got the technology, we've got the IP, and the know-how. We're really here at the show to find the right partners, to help us develop it further, find the right applications, and potentially license the technology. So, it'll be coming as soon as, as soon as it can. Ripper sound. Could it be on TVs? Could be on TVs. We recommend it for TVs and monitors. We don't recommend it for cell phones or tablets or other portable devices. Is it possible to have several people in the sofa and target one and the other, and can you target people? So in principle, you can, right now, it comes off in a single direction. In the center. Straight off the center. In principle, the beam can be steered, left and right, or up and down. That would require. Is it mechanical? No, no, I mean, mechanically, yes, you could do that, but no, you can electrically steer the beam. What that would require is many, many, basically divide it into strips. Each strip gets its own signal, and then you can control the phase and steer the beam. They call it a phase array. So maybe one person could hear one thing. The other one could hear another. Even right now, you could do that. Put one sound on this side, or one sound on this side, and then you could hear two different channels.