AGC showcases glass-based smart digital home concepts

AGC Asahi Glass (AGC), will be showcasing the company’s recent innovations in advanced materials and substrates for next-generation displays at its booth at Display Week 2018, which will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center (22-24 May). AGC is a pioneer and one of the top leaders in display materials, including glass substrates and cover glass used in LCD and OLED displays – making Display Week the ideal forum to showcase its latest developments for emerging in-home display applications that span A/V and home entertainment, AR/VR, IoT, industrial and signage markets.

The show will also mark the official US debut of AGC’s recently announced Glass Speaker, which features embedded technology that increases the acoustic characteristics of glass. This sound-generating Glass Speaker is a new type of laminated glass with a special intermediary layer sandwiched between two glass layers, mitigating the inherent resonance characteristics of glass to enable production of clear, steady sounds over a wide range of audio frequencies, from high to low. The company created this new material as part of its efforts to achieve high-quality sound production with glass as a medium.

“Several of the concepts in AGC’s Digital Home environment at Display Week bridge nature and technology in innovative ways – functionally, aesthetically, experientially, among other aspects,” notes Tom Trill, president of AGC’s Silicon Valley-based division ABDA (AGC Business Development Americas). “While glass has become ubiquitous, it is typically the user’s first point of contact with many of today’s analogue and digital devices As such, it is viewed simply as a cover, and intrinsically, a passive component. As peoples’ needs and wants evolve and intensify, and infrastructure expands – glass – that ‘first-point-of-contact’ is moving beyond a passive interface and becoming more integral to the overall user experience.”

Trill adds, “What you’ll see at Display Week is our vision to reinvent this material into a smarter, active, versatile and more sustainable platform, not only for display-centric products like TVs, mobile devices and wearables, but also for other consumer, commercial and industrial uses like agritech, architecture and beyond. By leveraging our materials leadership and innovation and working closely with customers and partners, we can bring to market game-changing technology that is backed with the quality and dependability that has become our hallmark in this industry over the years.”

The North American debut of AGC’s glass speaker technology demonstrates the company’s success to date in taking glass to new levels outside the display arena. Within the display market itself, the company’s proprietary Glascene™ technology holds tremendous potential for disrupting the digital signage market. This technology can deliver myriad image projection benefits that include flexibility, scale, resolution/viewability, easy maintenance – coupled with other advantages including low power consumption, biodegradable/environmentally friendly, highly versatile footprint/space savings in comparison to big bulky monitors.

Other demonstrations within AGC’s Digital Home experience at Display Week, include:

* Augmented digital window, skylight and lighting walls that, when combined, create an outdoor landscape environment that moves from morning through night in tune with the user’s biological clock while being in an occluded space or environment. This technology also can control a room’s ambience and temperature to streamline energy usage;

* Several smart rooms, including a kitchen and powder room that lets the user interface with technology in productive ways, like health monitoring/wellness tracking, multi-tasking household activities, and more.

At Display Week, AGC will also chair and deliver a number of technical presentations during the Symposium that runs parallel with the exhibits.