 And here we have the ClearInc display right here at the ID Tech X, where you just won another award. So hello, so who are you? My name is Joel Pollock. I'm an independent director. I'm the board of directors for ClearInc. And who are you? My name is Robert Fleming. I'm the CTO of ClearInc displays. And so at the SID display week a few months ago, you won the Best in Show, and that's the display conference for the whole world. It's a premier conference for displays internationally. And the best experts in the world looked at all of the entries and chose our display for display of the year. So it was quite an honor, and we're still working really hard to make it a realization to commercialize this, but we now have demonstrated something. And this is, as you were saying before when you got the award, you're saying that this has been a dream for... Are you saying for... Fifty years. Fifty years. My very first job in displays, you can see from my white hair, my very first job in displays, my manager, when I asked him what a perfect display was, he grabbed a sheet of paper. He said, make it like this. And while we have realized many dreams in the industry, such as the TV that hangs on the wall, we have yet to make something that's truly like paper. But I believe now we're finally on the verge of making something that's not only like paper, but can do video and do a color as well. And this is still one of the early prototypes, right? Oh yeah, there's some childhood disease here. There's fewer colors than there will be, right? Yes, that's true. We will have higher resolution, there will be more color. There's quite a few things that we're bringing to the next version that will come from our manufacturing partner. And that will happen by the top of next year. So that's when it gets mass produced and all the processes get optimized and stuff like that, right? We have a lot still to optimize. The R&D team, the engineering team are working very diligently to figure out all the rest of the details to bring it to a product. This is a very challenging time for us, but I'm extremely optimistic. The team is very talented and very capable, and they've done so much to bring this technology along to where it is today. So you were mentioning that you were working for a long time, right? Yes. And the goal was to reach paper. So what did you then go out and do at that point? What were you doing back then? Well, so we've done many things in the industry. Certainly there was a near-term goal to make things like a large area active matrix display for a TV to hang on the wall. People didn't believe that was possible. People didn't believe we would make flat panel displays that would replace CRTs. Now we can barely remember what a CRT was. Were you involved in those two? I've been at it a long time. I started at about the time when it was still dirt. Dirt? I go way back about 100 years on this. I've been in the display industry now nearly 50 years. LCD? I worked on LCDs when they didn't yet work at room temperature. So they were working in what? In extra heat or extra cold? You had to warm them up to work when I started. But now we take it for granted displays. We don't take for granted reflective displays, paper-like displays. This is the technology we need to do, to make e-school books, to make wearables, to make digital still cameras. Are you able to switch it over to the text mode or it's just a loop, right? This is a loop on this display. But it can show text and video. So this is an electrophoretic display. There are electrophoretic displays and a lot of e-paper displays that are used for e-readers. But none of them can do video. And none of them can do video color. This is really quite an improvement over what's been done. So do you promise? Are you confident that this is going to be the dream of the paper color animated video paper? This is... When I look at what the newspaper that Harry Potter had was, it was closest to this. And you had that in the Harry Potter movie? Oh yeah, I'm saying the Harry Potter movie. They had a dream that someday you would have a newspaper that showed color video. Well, if you wish to realize it, we are closer to having that technology than anything else has been done to date. So... Yeah, when you put a display with a polarizer on it, it never looks like paper. So there's no polarizer here? No polarizer here. This is why it looks so much like paper. There's no backlight, no polarizers. No backlight, no polarizers. But there's some tricks, some secrets. What we've really done is we've managed the light in this room with our micro-structured optics technology. We take the light in the room, we manage that light and bring it to the eyes of the viewer. So what we call... So it's called optical gain. So we maximize the light in this room and redirect it to the viewer. And so that's how you can see brighter and now you can add a color filter and you can get brighter displays. Is there some kind of filter on top? This has a color filter, standard color filter in the industry. Well, that's where our optical structure is in our optical lens technology. So our core is really the know-how on the optical materials and structures and micro-replication technology. Married that with the device architecture and the device physics to get an electrophoretic display that can do video and can do full color. Can it be flexible? Yes, it can. Yes, it can. Next. That's another challenge, right? We do it one step at a time but actually there's... This technology lends itself so much more to making a flexible display than anything else that's been made. Really? Yes. So it's easier than OLED and LCD to do flexible? OLED would, but the problem with OLED is you're not going to see OLED in full sunlight. This one, you can see this no matter how bright the sunlight is. We will actually make a front light for this so you can use it in total darkness but almost every display that's out there washes out when the bright sunlight. This one actually looks better as you can see here. So it's actually... It looks better when you go to the healthier place which is outside. Exactly, right. And now stay inside with indoor lighting, right? Exactly, right. Right now we have some strange spotlights and stuff. It's actually better to go outside. This is why the Chinese government is pushing so hard to specify a reflective display for e-textbooks because they want Chinese youth to go outside more. They're spending too much time inside studying and as a result 90% of Chinese youth are nearsighted. Is that why you're working with Chinese factory? Yes. Shenzhen is a factory for the whole world, right? Well, it's a factory for the whole world. No matter what you do, you go to Shenzhen, right? Of course. But no, that's different than selling to the China market. The China market is the first that will make e-school books. Japan and others will follow afterwards. So they're very interested? Extraordinary. You have meetings? Yes. Because it's 1.3 billion or people or something? It is a lot of people. There's a lot of students. They see the need for it. And they're going to make the conversion from paper textbook starting in 2018. So it's a great first target for us as is wearables. The Kindle is great. It's awesome. Oh, it's wonderful. It's beautiful, right? It's fantastic. It's black and white. Yeah. It'd be great to have the Harry Potter. Right? You can't do video. You can't do video? You can't do color. You can't, like, do all this touch activity so smoothly. You can do touch? You can do touch. Yeah, but you have to wait for things to refresh. But it flashes, you know? Yeah. It works very well and it's extraordinarily good for what it does. But what we're trying to do is serve different markets. Markets that really need video. Is there any chance it can be, let's say, cheaper than e-ink? Well, I can't imagine that it would be I can't really speak to price at this point because we're not yet into production. There's nothing intrinsically more expensive about what we're doing. Because sometimes I love those e-ink displays. The large ones are beautiful, but the display alone is like $500. And so they sell the devices at $700 or $800. It'd be so cool to have an A4 page that is affordable and that is like Harry Potter. Please understand. You can do it? Before I joined the board of directors at ClearInc, I was managing display development for Amazon. So I'm fully familiar with the Kindle and what it can do. It's an extraordinary display. It's a well-designed front light and it's exactly what's needed for books. We're going for a different market. Textbooks are quite different. We're going to need to have color and we're going to need to have moving illustrations and we're going to need to have scrolling capability that won't exist with today's electrophoretic displays. So what's the frame rate? Is it variable? Right now we're running at 34 frames per second. Why is it 34? It's kind of the status of the electronics and driving at the moment and the device architecture. So as the device architecture and electronics improve, we can go faster. So it's early stage technology. We're bringing all the supply chain. We're coming out of the lab into manufacturing now. So everything will improve. And it's fine if video is 30 and you display 34 that doesn't do an issue. It's fine. We can manage. And the power consumption? This is a very low-power display. Now it's not a bi-stable display. Bi-stable displays will probably be the lowest possible power consumption. But compared to any other technology that you can use, this one will be extraordinarily low-power. Extraordinary low-power. Well below what an LCD would do. Well below what an OLED would do because OLEDs are 40% less efficient for white. And for any textbook, you can imagine there's an awful lot of white. And you can imagine going outside where now if you have an emissive device, a transmissive LCD or an OLED, you'd have to turn the power to full brightness. And that really drains the battery. Where in the clearing display, the power doesn't change. And how does it compare with memory LCD? So memory LCD is a different issue. This is a question of whether there's memory in panel. Whether you have to refresh it or whether it can retain the image. That's not really where most of the power consumption is. Yes, for high resolution, it definitely saves power to put memory in panel. But the bulk of the power is consumed with the backlight in an LCD. Frankly, only about 10% of the light at best makes it from the backlight all the way to your eye in an LCD. Highly inefficient. And so when you're talking about getting to the paper, most paper is very white. Can you get white? Very white? How white can you get? We don't have hard data at the moment, but we have very good whiteness. And you can see in these, because you're using a color filter and you can mix the whites with good brightness. And you can see very good whites in this demo. And we're actually continue to make improvements. Our first goal is to make displays that are as good as a color copy. Our next goal will be to make displays that are as good as a textbook. Printed, high quality textbook. And those will come one after the other. We're going to increase resolution. We'll increase some of the other aspects of performance as we go along. And maybe not flexible, but can it be some kind of unbreakable entity? So you can have a very thin device, if it drops on the floor. Absolutely ruggedized, flexible, are all on our technology development roadmap, lightweight. But we're going into conventional fabs at the moment. So the strategy is to keep it very basic in terms of the fabrication technology. And that will keep the cost down as well. And at the SID display week, it sounded like it was coming very soon. And it's still coming very soon? We're scaling up at the moment. Production prototypes will happen at the beginning of 2018. Beginning? Yes. It's like two, three months from now. Production. We will be getting prototype off the manufacturing line by the beginning of 2018. So this is an exciting time, right? Very exciting time. Could be more exciting. Because there's 7 or 8 billion people in the world and you can try to imagine if this works out what it's going to do to all these people. It's going to be... 2018 is a very exciting year for ClearInc. So keep your eyes open for ClearInc in 2018. That's an exciting time.