When I saw that in an ars article I was like wtf? Why would you possible want an oled on a drone?
And then the obvious use case dropped.
Camouflage. If you had a drone surrounded by flexible oled displays with cameras taking in the surrounding scenery, you could essentially make it relatively invisible by having the displays show what’s on the other side in view of the camera.
Same goes for some potential new camo flexible oled clothes for a future soldier, or a harry potter invisibility cloak.
This seems like a FAR easier task than trying to actually bend light in the visible wavelength space around to make something invisible.
We could have predator like soldiers in the future. Fun times. And yes, I do want an invisibility cloak.
An OLED is an organic light emitting diode. They’re like ordinary LEDs, except that they can be made flexible, and might possibly be cheaper once all the R&D is done.
And invisibility cloaks only work from one vantage point. For comparison, consider the camouflage used by most fish. From above, all you see is dark water, so the top half of a fish is dark to blend in. And from below, all you see is bright sky, so the bottom half of a fish is light-colored to blend in. But from the side, you’ll see a fish that’s dark on top and light on the bottom, and it doesn’t blend in with anything.
It gets even worse when the scene around you isn’t neatly divided into just two uniform regions.
I’d imagine that OLEDs would be pretty handy for a much more intricate and advanced version of Yehudi lights for camouflaging drones, even if not as an actual invisibility cloak.
Mercedes car was just gen 1 tech and only using staid lcd displays, once we have body wraping/warping oled panels, and micro cameras that all form an omni directional visual map of all sorts of angles, we will have an even more advanced version of this
That’s not necessarily the case. Many animals are counter-shaded, meaning that they’re darker on top and lighter on the bottom because animal visual systems are cued to detect the lit parts and shadowed parts of animals under illumination. If you flip that, it throws that off and reduces the detectability of the animal.
The Yehudi lights work that I referenced earlier was a successful attempt during WWII to reduce the detection distance of aircraft through something kind of similar. They realized that aircraft and ships are typically detected visually through contrast vs. the sky behind it. So they arranged lights along the wings and other parts of the plane to the front, and photosensors behind, and basically adjusted the illumination from the lights to match the brightness of the background.
OLEDs would be really handy for camouflage, even if not as a literal invisiblity cloak. They could do adaptive countershading as the vehicle moves, they could do something similar to Yehudi lights, and they could do it all in a color spectrum appropriate to the environment. And none of that would require exactly duplicating the background.
Hell, you could do something like generate an adaptive camouflage pattern on the fly by analyzing the background colors, shapes and sizes, and project it via the OLED covering… nicely countershaded as well.
