This was our fourth and final prank of the week. This prank was a two parter…pretty fun and easy.

The participants in this prank was: me, Al, Casey, Tim, and Laurianne.

Part 1: Stealing Dee‘s monitor. Why do this? Well, leading up to her trip to Vegas, Dee has continually (jokingly) expressed her worry that she’d return and her monitor (the sexiest monitor in ITS, Hyde Hall) would be gone. We didn’t want her worries to go away so Al and I stole her monitor and hid it in one of our DBA’s office (this done without his knowledge either). Of course…this part was super fast.

Part 2: Ballooning the Office. We used 280 12 inch latex balloons provided by Laurianne, blowing them up with an electric pump (thank god) provided by Al. Over lunch, work began on blowing up balloons, tying them, and tossing them into Dee’s office area. Because Dee and Laurianne share an office, I used plastic wrap and tape to separate the two sections and hold in the balloons! We had a nice system going for balloon blowing/tying and banged through this prank pretty quickly! This prank was a fun one that left the balloon tying people’s fingers a bit sore.

Check out the full gallery of both prank parts!

Cheap – this means flat panel displays, if this technology catches on like we can hope it will, will become MUCH more affordable…they are expected to have a 20-40 percent cost advantage over LCDs
Thin and Flexible – OLED can be printed onto flexible material allowing for ultra-thin, ultra-bendy displays! Wikipedia mentions roll-up displays and displays embedded in clothing.
Contrast – Unlike LCD, OLED doesn’t require backlighting! Backlighting in LCDs prevents those displays from possessing a true ‘black’…in the absence of backlighting, OLEDs are able to achieve a large variation of contrast, color, and viewing angles.
Efficient – OLEDs are NOT power hogs. Due to the fact that they emit their own light and do not require backlighting, they do not consume the power that their LCD cousins do.

This technology sounds very very sexy…why hasn’t it become full mainstream yet? Well, like all fairly new technologies there are kinks to work out. OLEDs have a few glaring problems:

Color Lifespans – It seems in OLEDs, colors have a lifespan. The colors Red and Green have achieved lifespans of over 20,000 hours (over 2.2 years) but blue supposedly hasn’t done so well. CDT claims they have a blue OLED with a lifespan of over 100,000 hours. (thats ~11 years)
Patents – As always, new technologies are held back by patents. Kodak is the culprit in this case. For now, any company that wishes to use OLEDs needs to acquire a license.

It seems this display technology has promise and is overcoming its limitations. I look forward to the cheap, disposable displays of tomorrow but also shudder to think what revolutions to the advertising industry this may birth…with a flexible and cheap display, just imagine where companies will think to put their dynamic ads.

In the mean time, there are some companies that are moving forward with actual devices that make use of this technology…one that I am particularly excited about is the Optimus Keyboard

(other OLED sources: OLED Info, OLED Today, Overview of OLED Display Technology (pdf))