DMSD Insider: Assertive Display tech demoed on iPad at IFA- intelligently adjusts pixels in realtime to make content viewable in sunlight

Monday, September 3, 2012

Assertive Display tech demoed on iPad at IFA- intelligently adjusts pixels in realtime to make content viewable in sunlight

Assertive Display tech demoed on iPad at IFA- intelligently adjusts pixels in realtime to make content viewable in sunlight:

As part the International keynote presentations at IFA this year, AMD exec and president of the HSA foundation, Phil Rogers, took the stage to give an update on the current state of the not-for-profit alliance. For those of you unfamiliar with the foundation, HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture), is described as “a heterogeneous compute ecosystem, rooted in industry standards, for combining scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU while enabling high bandwidth access to memory and high application performance at low power consumption.”

While the addition of Samsung, among other partners Texas Instruments, ARM, AMD, and Imagination Technologies, was the big news of the day for most, a short demo by partner Apical was what really caught our attention.
Apical’s “Assertive Display” technology is already present in a few devices, such as Sharp’s AQUOS PHONE SH-01D, but during its demo for the HSA keynote, Apical showed off the tech working on an iPad…

Apical explained most mobile device manufacturers rely mainly on the user adjusting screen brightness to improve the viewing experience (most notably in bright sunlight). Unfortunately, that’s the biggest consumer of battery life in tablets and not very effective. Assertive Display, on the other hand, is an intelligent digital processing technology that “adjusts each pixel individually in real time, based models of how the display and the human visual system respond to the displayed content and the viewing environment.” The result is a vastly better viewing experience in the brightest conditions, as well as dramatically reduced power consumption (up to 50%) due to the fact you no longer require full brightness of the backlight to view content. A full video of Apical’s IFA demo is below:
As noted by Phil Rogers during the demo, Apical seems to be the only one solving this problem.

Assertive Display takes control of both the screen brightness, and of the color of each individual pixel of each video frame, and adjusts these coherently providing total control of viewing experience from total darkness to bright sunshine.