Corning, the company behind Gorilla Glass, has announced that it’s working on future versions of Gorilla Glass that will help with the reflectivity of the screens, and help fight against germs on your screen.
Reflectivity makes the screens less clear and less visible in sunlight, and it’s one of the biggest problems with mobile screens today. They look amazing inside a room, but terrible in comparison, when taken outside, and that’s something the tech industry will need to solve. Fortunately, Corning, historically a very innovative company, has taken upon themselves to solve this issue. A lot of high-end phones use Gorilla Glass screens, so if they solve it, that means you’re very likely to find it in your phone of choice in the near future.
Current screens have about 5% reflectivity, which is still a lot, and Corning plans to reduce that number to a percent larger than thin air’s reflectivity. See below how the new technology compares to what we have today (the circle area versus the rest of the screen):
That seems very impressive, doesn’t it? If they can do that, our smartphones’ screens will soon be almost as clear outside, as they are inside.
But Corning also has big plans to fight the bacteria on our screens. You’re using your phones all day long, and put your hands all over them, and then you press the phones to your face and ear. That can’t be too healthy. Corning plans to kill most of the bacteria on your phone’s screen with the new technology:
These new technologies should be available “in the next 2 years”, and it should help Gorilla Glass remain competitive with other competitors, and other materials such as sapphire. Gorilla Glass 3, which might arrive in some smartphones later this year, should already be much tougher than previous protective screen technology, but I think Corning wants other features for its screens, too, that can more easily stay ahead of competition, such as the ones below:
Glass can withstand an astonishing amount of pressure. Imagine, for example, a scale that measures the pressure under an elephant’s foot. Glass can theoretically tolerate the pressure of 10,000 elephants stacked on top of that scale – a strength of 10 gigapascals.
A sheet of glass is so stable that it would take 20 trillion times the age of the earth to create a visible sag in the thickness of a glass window. This dimensional stability is critical to manufacturers of high-performance devices.
You want to talk transparency? The glass used for optical fiber – which forms the backbone of the Internet – is 30 times more transparent than the purest water, and only about 1 percent less transmissive of light than air on a clear day.
As for being impermeable – consider the difference between plastic and glass covers on electronics. A molecule of oxygen could pass through a piece of 1-millimeter-thick plastic in about two weeks. That same trip would take 30 billion years through the same thickness of glass. That makes glass “an ideal enclosure for advanced display technologies such as OLEDs, which decay rapidly if exposed to oxygen or water,” said Mr Evenson