per that could download and display the day's news and be rolled up after use." PAPER-LIKE VIDEO DISPLAYS Today's flat panel displays are made on heavy, inflexible glass that can break during transportation and installation. Lu, working with post-doctoral fellow Sijin Han and engineering science student Brian Fung, developed FOLEDs that are made on a variety of lightweight, flexible materials ranging from trans- parent plastic films to reflective metal foils that can bend or roll into any shape. FOLED technology could be manufactured using a low-cost, high-efficiency mass-production method, Lu says. The team, which is already commercializ- ing some related technology, hopes a marketable device could be created within two to three years. Future ink-jet fabrication processes will allow liquid polymers to be inex- pensively sprayed onto flexible surfaces to create full-color, animated FOLED images on everything from signs to windows to wallpaper and even product boxes. "For example, cereal boxes that have an animation on the wall of the box-that's not impossible to imagine," says Raj Apre, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, the Xerox R&D subsidiary located in Palo Alto, Calif. "A simple animation is probably less than five years away," predicts Apre. A miniature radio receiver will permit a wide range of FOLED-enhanced products to be updatable, enabling manufacturers to instantly revise advertis- ing or product support information. Adding a tiny transmitter and antenna will allow products to support two-way communications. Although most people probably won't want to conduct a conversation via a cereal box, the technol- ogy will allow mobile phone technology to be built into a wide range of prod- ucts, such as FOLED-based newspapers, wristwatches, and even clothing, moving the world a big step closer to ubiquitous communication. 9.9.3 Polymer Displays The flat panel display business is huge and still growing rapidly. However, along with the demand for ever larger displays-for example, wall-sized T