Advanced Television

OLED technology on fabrics

December 2, 2016

By Chris Forrester

Nobody quite expects people to be wearing TV displays on the back of a suit or on a skirt, but scientists at South Korea’s national research institute (KAIST) say they have developed a manufacturing process that can lead to wearable fabric-based displays.

The report, by Steven Sechrist in specialist publication Display Daily, reports that the technicians at KAIST use a very thin film encapsulation technology which deposits an OLED substrate on fabrics. Moreover, the end result is that the fabric is more flexible than traditional plastic substrates.

Sechrist explains that the technology is not completely new, and similar developments have managed to put OLEDs onto T-shirts, and capable of withstanding ironing. Indeed, he says that Canada’s Concordia University’s Dept. of Design & Computation Arts, in its Karma Chameleon long-term ‘smart garment’ project began to create clothing concepts in 2013 that could change how a garment might change colour dependent on the wearer’s mood.

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