Just to cut this off at the head: The second video on the page shows the fabric being used as a display with animations. See it here:
<a href="https://obj.shine.cn/files/2021/03/11/d1a7a108-37b8-422b-9660-b4609eca80af_0.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://obj.shine.cn/files/2021/03/11/d1a7a108-37b8-422b-966...</a>
Very cool. The basic principle is that a conductive wire is coated in EL material. Those wires run one direction in the weave of the matrix -- lets call them columns. And then the other direction is another wire that is relatively flat that contacts against the EL material and lays nicely flat against the EL coated wire. The second set of wires lets call those rows. Since the rows are fairly transparent, when you apply a voltage between the column and row you form a voltage across the EL material and it lights up in that particular row / column intersection. That's how you address each pixel. The transparent electrodes are polyurethane ionic gel fibers that use a ionic material called EMIM-TFSI apparently.
This is interesting, but durability and cost will be a huge factor in investment or adoltion. Reading about the illumination control electronics also sounds like describing it as a "display" in the common usage is not accurate. Without a lot of new electronics it's just an illuminated pattern controlled by the loom.<p>That's still potentially valuable, but you won't see arbitrary moving images any time soon. It might be possible to use many of the passive matrix methods to allow changes at low resolutions, like segmented displays.
The paper: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03295-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03295-8</a>
Isn't this basically thread-sized "EL Wire" [0] woven into a fabric?<p>The hard part presumably is turning it into an addressable matrix, not simply weaving it into a fabric.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroluminescent_wire" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroluminescent_wire</a>
Remember how one if the main characters of the "Three body problem" woke up from hibernation in the future, and every surface was a display? That's cool tech and all, but do we need more displays?
Ah, more flexible electroluminescent wire. Nice. Coming soon to a Burning Man camp near you.<p>Not a display technology until someone figures out how to turn small sections, not just entire strands, on and off.