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Technology

Displays That Harvest Light Instead Of Creating It 73

Posted by timothy from the incredible-ambience! dept.
mach10 writes: "An article here shows that a scientist has been able to create fibers that collect ambient light, strong enough to power a dotted matrix for display. It can reach 30 times ambient light, and they are soon hoping to expand the area to replace signs on roads. Hrm ... But my sundial watch still doesn't work in the dark =\" Add this to some ultra-efficient light source (like white LEDs?), a low-power processor, human power and some solar cells, and most of my requirements for portable computing happiness would be met.
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Displays That Harvest Light Instead Of Creating It More

Displays That Harvest Light Instead Of Creating It

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  • Well, you could feed some solar batteries much more efficiency with 30 times the ambient light.


    ____________________

  • Re:Cheap night vision? (Score:3)

    by Matt_Bennett ( 79107 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @02:17AM (#690838) Homepage Journal
    So, when (and where) can I pick up my almost free night vision goggles?

    They're already here (kinda). Binoculars (with large lenses) collect more light than the unaided human eye and can serve to amplify the light- you just need to find binoculars that have large lenses and low magnification. This works especially well in low light (dusk, not dark) situations.
  • What do you get out of this? Why do you do it? Are you repressed? Or are you incapible of thinking anything other than suck my cock?

  • Re:Obvious problem (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's bound to need quite a bit more than that. This ain't nanotech here.
  • A cluster of these fibres could be formed together to form a panel. This could be fed a light source from a few white LEDs that could form large panels of white light fitted flush to ceilings or walls. With clever "fibre plumbing" entire walls could give off cool white light, and could be switched to pull daylight deep into a room from outside. Also, imagine the possibilities of large light strips covering the front of cars, powered cheaply by LEDs...
  • Imagine a handheld that no longer had the dissapearing-screen-in-bright-sunlight effect we all know and love!

    I'm imagining a handheld with several thousand flourescent fibers sticking out. I think it would look like a troll doll. It'd look pretty funny in your pocket.



  • Can't tell how "rusted" this pipe is from the online article. :)
  • So... I'm thinking the biggest breakthrough here will be for indoor marijuana growers, who will no longer have to consume suspiciously large amounts of electricity in order to nourish their kind bud?
  • shining down on the pumpkin patch. Those autuminal evenings are just beautiful. How do create a Harvest light like that? What are you talking about?
  • You get to pick the color of rust but the amount of holes is still unknown..
  • Ummm... Sorry but I thought most of the heat you get from solar cells was from the resistance in the silicon before the gathered power hits the bus wires.
  • immediate uses I can think of.... 1.) you know all those displays at airports/train stations/etc? the ones that flash times of arrival/departure/etc? since each pixel is SWITCHEABLE on/off, they can use 0 power to use those displays! 2.) flashlights/reflective gear! since this device amplifies light 30 times NOW (and probably more later), .. you can imagine the HUGE amount of usage here. ... countless others ...
  • Well, there's ways... a white Nichia don't have to cost that much.

    See if the LED Museum's purchasing information page [att.net] has pointers to better prices for the LEDs you want. I very much recommend checking out Craig Johnson's LED Museum [att.net].

  • my fire. how does this affect you?
  • If we had a lot of this those fibers giving 30x ambient light, could we combine them (like a beowulf cluster ;-) to drive the light into an other fiber, and finally get 900x ambient light?

    ____________________
  • It absorbs light, and then re-emits it as display on the screen?? Wow... sounds perfect for glare reduction, ect. No more light around the computer, more light FROM the computer!
  • No one has asked this yet, and I can't glean it from the article.

    Do these threads use light, or absorb it?

    Because if they absorb it, this technology will make a room darker as it works. I don't see how it's possible to actually absorb light (instead of deflect or refract it).
    But then, I am rusty on my physics.

    Vesuvius
  • Check this out:

    Janos Hajto of Napier University in Edinburgh says the screen is so efficient at harvesting light from the environment, that it even works at night.

    Seems it works at night as well!

  • Do you mean that yellow/green LEDs should be used to provide the ambient light for the fibers? That doesn't make sense, because even if (which I doubt) the dyes the fibers use will flouresce from just yellow/green wavelengths, you end up getting different colors out the ends of the fibers anyway. I suspect the fibers work best with either full-visible-spectrum ambient light, or with predominantly low-wavelength light, like blue/violet/ultraviolet light, because those wavelengths have enough energy to make things flouresce very well.

    Or do you mean that we should all look at screens in colors that are close to our peak of vision, because they will appear brighter to us? Wait, I thought we wanted full color screens....

    LEDs are mad cool, but if you're going to use them to illuminate these fibers, you'll probably want either white ones, for full spectrum color, or blue ones, for sheer energy to make the dyes in the fibers flouresce.

  • My physics-major college roommate used fluorescing glass fibers in a project at Fermilab, and he brought some back home to play with. They were maybe 25cm (~10 inches) long, and very narrow, similar to fishing line. When exposed to light perpendicular to its length, a surprisingly bright purple light came out of both ends; the brighter the incident light, the brighter the flashlight-type dot of light that came out of the end. If you covered up part of the fiber, light still came out the end, just dimmer. The longer the fiber exposed to the light, the brighter the dot. We tried this with incandecent and fluorescent bulbs, bright sunlight, dim sunlight, candlelight, flashlights of various brightness, any light source we could lay our hands on. The only thing that changed was the intensity of the glowing dot.

    A similar technique is used in light-gathering spotting sights. These are popular with bowhunters, and are essentially a rod of fluorescing plastic (~5cm long, ~0.5cm in diam) that you mount on your bow to help you sight on the target. The end is tapered and set at a right angle such that the incident light that hits the side of the rod makes the tapered little point (~0.2cm in diam) glow really brightly. Based on my rough estimates of the dimensions, I'd say that the area of the side of the rod (capturing incident light) is ~100X the size of the glowing tip. As with the narrow fibers, it works under any light level except complete blackness, and remember, under very dim conditions, even a faintly glowing dot looks bright.

  • Hmmm (Score:1)

    by Stott ( 132670 )
    I could use one of these...

    Everytime that little light bulb appears above my wifes head I could use this to suck the light energy away from it and I'd be right!

    Whoohoo, I'd be right! That'd be a first!!

    Trevor.
  • a lot of them are now LEDs, not just the Chevy Impala. Also, the 3rd brake light at the top of the rear window (at least on American cars -- is this also required in Europe? I rather assume so, but don't remember ...)

    LEDs (nearly) never need replacing, are fairly shock insensitive, are bright. I can't wait till they're cheaper for the colors besides red (which is free, thanks to Radio Shack!:) )

    simon
  • They've had shotgun sights that use this principle on the market for several years now. You have an inch-long stick of fiber mounted along the end of the barrel that collects light and channels it towards the shooter's eye. They work pretty well, but they can be fragile.

    At any rate, this is nothing new.

    Jon
  • where I see something like this being usefull, if the process is more efficent than motor drives, is for collecting light for solar panels. solar panels work great in direct light, but it would be great to produce fairly efficient use of ambient light. tho the surface area of the fibers would have to be signifigantly larger than a normal direct light panel. but i bet they would be a lot less obtrusive than a normal panel.. you could just strech a tarp like sheet out over a roof to collect the light.
  • ...from a friend at the last company I worked for full-time, back around 1988. He said that, years earlier, he'd come up with some "thing" (not sure whether he invented it himself, but I think he did).

    It was a panel formed in a way that light coming in perpendicular to its surface would cause light to come out one or more edges, kinda like the invention(s) described in this forum, except I don't know if his used fibre.

    His device was comparatively inexpensive to manufacture.

    But, turns out it'd stop working after awhile. Thinking about it later, I wondered if maybe it was kinda chaotic internally, except with only one path for light to leave. Maybe that meant the light would bounce around a lot. And maybe there's no such thing as a "perfect" reflector, so each "bounce" cost not just a bit of energy, but a bit of thermal transfer to the imperfect reflectors.

    So I wonder whether the problem was that the heat would build up inside, due to all the excess reflections, and finally break down the structure itself.

    Anyway, it sounded pretty interesting. He said the people who helped him look into what it'd take to "fix" it felt it'd cost so much more to manufacture it to not fail that it'd no longer be a cost-effective element of a system.

    What I'm suggesting here is that the invention itself, functionally speaking, is probably not very new or exciting...but if it can be profitably manufactured and sold, that might be pretty exciting!

  • How is this gathering ambient light along its length? Sounds more like it is moving light from one open end to the other. (In other words, just the usual optical fiber behavior.)

  • Human power, solar and collection systems (Score:3)

    by mr ( 88570 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @04:53AM (#690863)
    A well conditioned human can pedal at about 45 watts for 2-3 hours, 30 for a long time, and 60 for 30 minute bursts.

    So, the human powered option is out for many applications.

    The fibers *MAY* have applications in solar systems. What kills the cells is heat buildup more than anything else, and the concentrator *MIGHT* not allow infra-red to pass, but allow the other parts of the bandwidth to pass.
    A company called (methinks) marathon solor used to have a light conentration system for its cells to boost output. Such a method is economical *IF* the cells are expensive and the fiber is cheap. (oh, and they are now bankrupt)

    Given that you can now buy solar cells as shingles to go on your roof, I have to question if the economics are right to use fiber concentration on silicon cells.

    Home power [homepower.com] is a nice place for figuring out how to get off the grid, and this gent [redrok.com] thinks the future for cheap solar is heliostats. Combine a heliostat with a helium-as-working-fluid sterling cycle prime mover, and you may just have a winner!
  • No, I was thinking about being able to matrix together a panel that had a "face" made up of the very ends of the fibres. The length of the fibres would be "plumbed" to spread flat or to fit into some form of trunking. Light entering one "face" would shine along the fibre length and shine out of the other face creating glowing panels. In theory, one could create a panel for your roof, maybe facing South that sunlight would shine onto and the light could be plumbed down into the house, with fibres branchine off to supply light to smaller panels in different areas or rooms. Similar things can be done now with standard optical fibres, but the extra brightness that the new fibres would add would allow sophisticated "light networking". Imagine your desk being illuminated by natural daylight coming from a panel or thin strip for free.
  • Hang on, if it needs ambient light to operate but creates 30xambient - you've got an infinite power source. Each light will create enough light to power 29 of its fellows which could then power your computer system (okay, might need a few more than 30 but..). Continually environmentally friendly power source for the cost of a few bulbs...
    Richy C. [beebware.com]
    --
  • These fibers are collecting ambient light, not amplifying it.

    Um... Okay. Well, actually, the article says, "Hajto started by mixing fluorescent dyes into a transparent polymer called polycarbonate. He then stretched the polymer into fibres."

    The flourescent dyes actually do amplify the light, albeit only UV light if I'm not mistaken. So LEDs still wouldn't really work (unless there are UV LEDs?) but still. I think that's actually the major thing that this thing has over plain fibre-optics (besides the fact that plain fibre-optics wouldn't really accept any new light from the sides... or maybe I'm mistaken again).

    Just thought I'd add my $0.02.

    -------------
    No worries.
  • cool... where do i sign up
  • Are you nuts? You wasted a FP for an interresting comment!
    The loosers will yell and send killers to shoot you.

    ____________________
  • Now what I have seen in the previous replies is indicative of the fact that the real breakthrough is not being pronounced well enough. I am sure most people have seen the displays at stores (usually batteries) where there appears to be a bright bead of flourescent light coming from an unknown source. If you look on the top of the stand/display you see a clear plexiglass-like surface, the edges of which give off the intense light. The plexi channels the light from the room into its two inner-mirrored surfaces and thereby concentrates the light into the thin bead comprising the outer edge. The same thing is happening with these fibers. However, they are round and not flat. Same material, same premise. The real breakthrough is that the man has been able to switch them on and off, making them usefull for such applications as displays. By placing three fibers of the base light colors (RGB) side-by-side, one would achive a pixel. Depending upon how small the switching package is, one could conceive a flat-screen. However, the more probable end-result for this technology is applications requiring a high-intensity display. i.e. Outdoor screens, projection, etc.
  • Behold the miracle of the multiplication of light source.

    It's very promising. But I wonder how many years untill it is available/affordable for us, common mortals. ASAP, I hope.

    Hugs
  • Since divergence is less than one, the intensity will increase as compared to the orginal light.
  • These sound great. . .but from what I'm getting from the article and the word 'ambient' is that they wouldn't work so well in anything other than bright light. Thats a bummer for a lot of potential applications of an otherwise great idea. . .

    Still, maybe its a useful idea to combine with existing LCD tech? Imagine a handheld that no longer had the dissapearing-screen-in-bright-sunlight effect we all know and love! Perhaps add these fibers in addition to a backlight and we'd be talking big-time potential for improvement.

    -s

  • Re:inaccuracy in the article (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You don't have to send current, you just have to have a difference in potential

    between

    MY STIFFY and my HARD COCK
  • would have a supplementary power source to amplify the light... you can't get somethin fer nuthin now adays... Oh well...

    JDWilso2
  • The way it works is by collecting light, not creating it. Each fiber takes the ambient light hitting it and channels it to its ends. Kind of like how a telescope takes the small amount of light entering it and focuses it to a point.


    If you're not wasted, the day is.
  • But you have to plug a Lite Brite in. If nothing else this could be the 21st Century self illuminating Lite Brite. Think they can get it onto the market before Dec 25?
  • So, when (and where) can I pick up my almost free night vision goggles?
    And perhaps a surveilance system that needs no power? Just some "old cables" lying around in the back yard, and I know if it is the kids, the wife, the mistress or the IRS that is coming. . .


    ---
  • I've yet to see anything that says how long it has to be to pick up enough light. If it's short, then great. If it's 1m or so, it's hardly practical as a screen or goggles!

    I've a feeling that this may also be fundamentally limited by the amount of light around. 30 x 0 is still 0, so for night work, you may need some more severe amplification.

    Grab.

  • Always the right brightness (Score:3)

    by ESD ( 62 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @01:32AM (#690879)
    This is very interesting: because the fibers collect ambient light, the screens will get brighter if there is more ambient light. This is very useful if you are sitting in an environment where the light-intensity changes a lot (for example: sitting in a train in bright sunlight, and then the train goes into a tunnel)

    This would solve a lot of my problems with my TFT-screen.
  • you don't need current to have the voltage; for a system like an LCD that is like a capacitor, you only need a current to change the voltage.

    switching the voltage on liquid crystals requires a lot less power than backlighting ... that's why current LCD displays get such good battery life when used in devices.
  • >I don't see how it is possible to actually absorb light

    What do you think the color black is? It is what we see when we look at an object that absorbs all the visible light that hits it instead of reflecting or refracting it.
  • I remember seeing a bit on Tomorrows World (UK) about a plastic sheet that would channel ambient light to its edges. I'm sure it worked because of a dye (orange?) added to the plastic.

    The take they had on this was to place efficient but expensive solar cells on the edges of the plastic for more cost effective electricity production.

    Wouldnt the fibers need to be open to the ambient light to work. If they are contained within a screen wouldnt this stop the required light from reaching them in the first place.

    Thought: Does this just work for visible light or would it work for other wavelengths? (x-ray, etc)
    Could this be used as radiation shielding with the fibers intercepting, for example, a laser and re-radiating the energy harmlessly away from the shield.

  • "You'll obey the laws of thermal dynamics in this house young lady!!" -Homer J.
  • ambient light causes dyes in the fiber to fluoresce-- fluorescence is when light is absorbeb by something, which re-emits that energy (or some of it) at a different wavelength. this is where Day-Glow colors come from. or how blacklights work.

    any surface that isn't a perfect mirror will make a room darker just by sitting there. light can most certainly be absorbed by objects- how else would you be able to heat things by radiation? when the sun shines on you, you feel warm because you are absorbing some of the energy in the sunlight, and it raises your skin temperature.
  • What's up circle reasoning... err cyclical/renewable energy.

    Actually, where I live they have started using LED's in stop lights and such because they've found that they last for a longer period of time and seem to be more noticeable to people.

    Also of interest is that the rear brake lights of a Chevy Impala now use LED's. Just a random fact...
  • It seems pretty stupid to use this with an artificial light source like a bank of LEDs. You would be better off just using the LEDs. As others have pointed out this system MUST be lossy. You will get LESS light out of it than what you put in. This is usefull with levels of ambient that can be concentrated, but if there is no ambient and you use an artificial source you will be wasting energy.
  • ...Google search yeilded only inaccesible servers

    Thing I love about google is that you can click "cached" next to the search result, and get a copy from google's cache, of pages that have been deleted. And quite often it's quicker! :-)

  • White LED efficiency that of parent LED (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    White LEDs are two-step devices: step 1 is to run a green or green/yellow LED and step 2 is to convert the narrow spectral band of the green/yellow light into a broader one. This is done via fluorescence, there is a little pellet of mixed material near the LED junction that fluoresces in the presence of the LED light. The spectral response of a 'white' LED is lumpy, with one peak in the blue and another in the yellow. The mix of fluorescent material is obvious if you compare white LEDs between lots: some are much bluer than others. The fluorescence step inevitably increases entropy.

    A truly efficient backlight for this fellow's screen would be three colors of LED (RGB), not a white one.
  • Yup, and one must remember that the process of creating light is *extremely* lossy(LEDs have the best ratio, though). Combine this with transfer losses from the sources to the fibers and losses in the fibers and it does start to seem extremely stupid... And yes.. my choice of equipment for exploring a cave definetly would be a laptop and a flashlight. e-mail is so much more convienient in pitch black deep cave exploration then say walkie talkie. I mean, people spend weeks in these caves and stuff and just cant live without email..
  • These fibers don't transfer light in the purest sense. Light(photons) hits the side of the fiber and excites electrons. Shortly afterwards these electrons lose their excited stage but instead of releasing their energy(new photon) as light outside the fiber they release it inside the fiber. This is called fluoresence, btw. The fiber seems to be a normal fiber-optical fiber with all the properties that come with it(little loss with light transfer). Thus the end result is that you transform your ambient light into one dull color(could you live in a neon-pink room?).

  • Re:White LED efficiency that of parent LED (Score:3)

    by kobotronic ( 240246 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @06:31AM (#690891)
    The super-highbright white LEDs from Nichia uses a blue LED for the base light, with a coating of yellow phosphor at the base that responds to the ultra violet wavelengths to create a somewhat cold-looking but highly power efficient white light. Like the other guy said, the resulting light spectrum is spotty, there's big peaks on blue and yellow and very little else. The light is great for utility light and display backlight, but it's somewhat antiseptic and unpleasant for room illumination. Like an old-type fluorescent tube. I fit ten of these in the hood of my car, for light at night in the event of an engine failure. And they use virtually no power at all.

    Interestingly, the blue Nichias has quite a lot of UV output, which can be used for blacklight applications with a filter.

    Unfiltered CCD cameras hate the blue Nichia light, probably because of the UV stuff. They think the (rather pretty) deep blue light is tinted magenta or cyan.

  • 3000% energy efficiency (Score:3)

    by kyz ( 225372 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @12:39AM (#690892) Homepage
    "So, if these fibres take in light and output it 30x brighter, why not make a feedback loop?"

    It's a great idea, but the problem is that you're getting more energy out of the system than you put in. Energy efficiency doesn't go over 100%, so either these phosphors have energy hidden in them (and they'll run out over time, like batteries), or this system collects a lot of ambient light and concentrates it into a small space.
  • It's no computer screen yet (at least of the quality we're used to). he just switches the R,G, or B on or off.

  • I can't help it, (Score:5)

    by FreeJack1 ( 203705 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @12:41AM (#690894)
    but after reading the article and especially observing the image alongside it, I have to say that I'm impressed that the scientists have finally discovered a Lite-Brite toy! What is it that they're hoping to accomplish with it, besides drawing pretty and colorful pictures?
    Never mind...
    --

    Vote Homer Simpson for President!

  • Obvious problem (Score:3)

    by malahoo ( 128370 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @12:41AM (#690895) Homepage
    Not surprisingly, the article is pretty thin on details, and since my extensive 3-minute Google search yeilded only inaccesible servers, I'm still wondering: how much surface area do these things need to collect light? From the article:
    When ambient light hits a fibre, the dye molecules fluoresce, producing light of a particular colour, which is reflected towards the ends of the fibre.

    But it doesn't say how long each fibre needs to be to produce its two dots of light. I assume that (up to a point) as you increase the lenght of the fibre, the ends get brighter. So for 30x ambient do you need a 1 meter fibre? 5 meters? 100 meters?

    Let's see if we can find some real linkage...


    If you're not wasted, the day is.

  • Re:3000% energy efficiency (Score:5)

    by malahoo ( 128370 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @12:45AM (#690896) Homepage
    No, it works like this:
    1. Lots of free, ambient light hits the fiber
    2. Some of the energy in this light causes the fiber to flouresce
    3. The light produced by this flourescence is channeled to and focused on the ends of the fiber.
    You're not violating Thermo, because the input energy is not amplified by 30x, it is being transduced, with considerable inefficency, and sharply focused.


    If you're not wasted, the day is.
  • Ok, anyone up for 'The Matrix'?

    //Humming
  • uh, no. a voltage is just a potential difference between two points, this can even be just electrical charge. No flow of current has to be taking place, of course voltage is not just something which flows, it is the means which can cause a current, or transfer of charge. In short, yes you can have a voltage (potential difference of charge) with no current flowing. How the fuck do u think lightning works? Or capacitors for that matter?(especially parallel plate ones) do E-fields suddenly not exist?

  • As I recall, there is a small transient current during switching (basically, it's like charging a capacitor), but practically no continuous current draw. That's why LCDs are low in power.

    --Joe
    --
    Wanna program the Intellivision? Get an Intellicart! [schells.com]
  • Yeah, the article is about using ambient light; but if you add an efficient light source, all you're talking about is adding a known and reliable *source* for the ambient light. For instance (to be arbitrary) if you were exploring a deep cave and wanted to read all the email you had recently downloaded as a tarball from your server ala RMS, what would you do? Or if you were in a dark bedroom, truly truly dark?

    If there's no ambient light to be had (and you don't want to waste your high-power flashlight, which creates a strong beam using lots of battery juice), you switch on the small bank of LEDs (or are there even more efficient light sources? I don't want to drop in cyalume sticks all the time;) )which fit in your portable computer analogous to the backlight in a normal notebook ... you get a warm glow and read away.

    What I wonder is how long a fiber has to be, and in what configuration, to capture enough light to be useful (For instance, will it collect efficiently if a good portion is coiled? That would seem important in a space-saving screen ...)

    Also, what is the tightest resolution that could be achieved with these little dots? Lite-bright? 15" SXGA?

    The article doesn't really address those issues, unfortunately.

    simon

  • The human eye's sensitivity to light peaks in the yellow-green area of the visible spectrum. Coincidentally (?) this is the color of the sun. Using yellow or green LEDs, like these [thinkgeek.com] would consume less power for the same effect.

  • Can anyone say "Light Brite"? I'd sure buy one that didn't take a light bulb.

    Even the samurai
    have teddy bears,
    and even the teddy bears

  • I respect Thad Starner's work, but like a lot of peopel today (especially twigs, like him), he vastly overestimates the energy in those dreaded fat grams. There are 9 "small calories" (=4.19 J)
    not 9000, as he says. He's thinking of "large calories.

    Quick reality check, burn a gram of fat (1/28th oz - or a fingernail-sized blob). Does he really think that this will raise the temperature of a liter (quart) of water by 9 C (16 F). Even with the inefficiencies of combustion and heating, it's clear he's a few orders of magnitude off

    Please adjust his calculations accordingly when you read the article.
  • Uh.. So let me get this straight.. Instead of putting the high efficiency LEDs in front of the car in the first place you want to only expose these fibers to LEDs and then direct the remainder (maybe 10%, if you're lucky) in the form of a colored light to the front of the car?

    With regards to "fiber plumbing" you'd be better of actually reading the article before posting. It is fairly clearly stated that these fibers produce only a single color(a wavelength) of light whereas white light is a combination of several colors in right proportions. And were not even talking about trying to recreate natural(sun) looking light, which is a lot more difficult.

  • Rain gutter is actually terribly optimistic. This fiber might be (for its likely efficiency) more like a rain gutter from a 30-year-old house that hasn't been maintained. Sure it's rusty and full of holes but you still get *some brown* water at the end of the pipe..
  • And I thought blue ones were expensive...

  • Not a power source (Score:5)

    by KarmaBlackballed ( 222917 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @01:01AM (#690907) Homepage Journal
    ...Add this to some ultra-efficient light source...
    Some folks are misunderstanding the principle here. These fibers are collecting ambient light, not amplifying it. Like all things in the physical world, there is a power loss through the fiber, so you are not getting something for nothing.

    Think of this invention as analogous to a rain gutter where light is the water and the gutter is the optical fiber. When it rains, water is "collected" along the length of plumbing that edges the roof. No extra water is created, but the volume of water at the end of the pipe is an amplification of what would have been there without the gutters.

    The innovation here is that no one has created a fiber that easily collected ambient light along its length before. The only other way I know of to focus ambient light is to use mirrors or lenses. Clearly the fiber sounds cheaper, less bulky, and less fragile.
  • When you focus the ambient light the fiber "catches" to the size of the dot the fiber produces the intensity will probably be much higher than that of the dot produced by the fiber.
    Therefore the intensity of the light produced by the fiber when the only light source is itself (if you can get it kick started) will not increase. So this is not really an infinite power supply

  • Cost? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Of course it'll take a _long_ time (relative to I-WANT-IT-NOW) until monitors of these kind is out in the stores, but it'd be nice to know aprox. how much one would cost. Since it's using fibers and not shooting electrons through a pipe I'd guess it could be made as thinn as tft or perhaps even thinner. Nice to have on my desk.

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