A company that hopes to transform common printed posters and packing into low cost, paper-thin video displays has landed a £6 million funding boost.
Bodle Technologies, an Oxford University spinout, says the funds (worth approximately €6.8 million) will be used to scale the company and advance through the prototype stage to “enable ‘display anywhere’ applications”.
The company is developing “solid reflective displays”, or SRDs, for applications that include wearables, Internet-of-Things (IoT) displays and eReaders. In the future, the technology could turn static printed materials into low-cost displays.
Bodle’s light reflecting pixels can be used in flexible and on-glass displays to reduce the power needed to project video or remove power requirements for static images altogether.
The technology was invented by Professor Harish Bhaskaran and postdoctoral researcher Dr Peiman Hosseini at Oxford University’s Department of Materials and was published in Nature in 2014. Since forming, the company has attracted Silicon Valley veteran Mike Clary as CEO.
Clary said: “Electronic displays continue to be outnumbered by the vast number of static, non-digital displays around us – in the form of permanently printed text and graphics. Our technology offers the chance to seamlessly integrate displays onto the surfaces and objects around us. It enables a natural display of vivid colours, which is unconstrained by hard-wired mains power or excessive battery drain, which even acts in no-energy mode when required.”