We all know and love Gorilla Glass. You know the stuff; it protects the displays of most smartphones, tablets and even HDTV’s that are currently on the market. This week, the brain behind the popular glass, Corning, has unveiled one of its latest projects at Display Week in Boston, just a few short days ago. Meet Willow Glass: the ultra-thin, ultra-flexible display that may well cover your favourite devices in the future…
Willow Glass boasts a number of “improvements” (or, differences, if you will) over its primate counterpart . Namely, the materials used to manufacture it, and it’s unusual behaviour in relation to movement.
Willow Glass can reach temperatures of 50o°C without compromising its overall width– which, roughly, matches that of a piece of paper. In addition, as you may have noticed from the above images, Willow Glass bends and wraps. In a nutshell, it’s products like Willow Glass that are paving the way in allowing for the implementation of flexible displays for common devices. What’s more, Corning have stated that Willow Glass is able to utilise touch sensor technology extremely well, so one can almost expect this new design to be aimed at smartphone manufacturers, at the very least.
Although Corning’s Willow Glass isn’t the only flexible display material available to device manufacturers, we can be sure that its reputation will give it a helping hand over the competition. Having said this, it will be quite some time (to sound generic) before we see devices with this material wrapped around them being readied for consumers.
To learn a little more about the properties of Willow Glass, in addition to viewing how it is manufactured, take a peek at the below video and Corning’s official Willow Glass Press Release.
How would you like to see Corning’s Willow Glass implemented? Leave a comment below which details your ideas..
