"Well it's a problem that can't be solved by display alone," replied Tusch. And no one else has solved this have they?" "But I just hope people realise that for any colour display today to be viewable in bright light, it has Apical technology. "I know you're a fairly modest chap," he told Tusch on the keynote stage. This was a point highlighted at the conclusion of Tusch's IFA presentation in Berlin, by Phil Rogers, president of the HSA Foundation. This is not that surprising, considering that Apical appears to be the first company in the world to have cracked the problem of viewing multimedia content in bright light on mobile devices. "It's had that real 'wow factor'." Unique to Apical "Just about every company that has seen it has liked it and wanted it," he says. Most of the major smartphone and tablet makers have seen the technology. The industry response to Assertive Display so far has been unanimously positive, says Michael Tusch. To help achieve this, Apical recently joined the HSA Foundation, an increasingly powerful alliance of manufacturers whose membership includes Samsung. To overcome this hurdle, Apical is seeking to run Assertive Display as software, so that each successive generation of the technology can be delivered as a firmware update or a software upgrade. This is due to the complexities of having numerous parties licensing their technologies on the same 'real estate' of the processing chip. One of the major challenges for Apical is overcoming the slow cycle from the design stage through to market. While he refuses to divulge which manufacturers will ship products with this technology, it seems clear that it will encompass Apple and Android devices. Smartphones and tablets featuring Assertive Display technology will be available in the UK by autumn 2013, according to Tusch. It's always on, continuously reading the viewing conditions and controlling the contrast ratio automatically. There is no slider or button to control Assertive Display. Viewing conditions are monitored via the tiny light sensors on mobile devices and the pixels are tuned accordingly. The whole aim of Assertive Display is to adjust the contrast ratio without you ever noticing. And we're doing it via video processing, as opposed to controlling the display power. "What we're simulating here is a display that has 100 times higher contrast than we really have. "But actually, that's pretty much working in the margins," says Tusch. The technology is based on a model of how the human eye works, tuning the pixels so that you can view a movie or play an immersive game in bright light without killing the battery. Instead, Assertive Display works by adapting the contrast ratio, adjusting each pixel of the video stream in real-time, with very short latency so that you don't notice. But this is ineffective and the biggest drain on battery power. Most mobile device manufacturers rely on adjusting screen brightness to improve viewing experience. Watch the Assertive Display demo presentation from IFA 2012: Your multimedia experience is being degraded, and we can avoid that." "And it's not just in sunlight, it's the same if you're just sitting in a room with windows or with bright lighting. An iPad can do 1000-to-1, but if you went outside that would diminish severely, to 20-to1. Ideally, you need the 5000-to-1 contrast ratio of a TV to show a movie. If you were a first person shooter game addict, for example, nobody would play that on anything other than a bright screen in a fairly dark room. "But unless you're in a dark room, your experience is heavily compromised. "The whole point of these mobile devices is that we should be able to use them wherever we are," he says.
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