San Diego, CA – As with Semicon West San Francisco and San Jose last month, attendance at the annual meeting of the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), which ended during the first week of August, settled down from the telecom surge of last year to a more typical size of about 5100 attendees, 2500 technical papers, and 243 exhibitors.
Last year's SPIE annual meeting attendance had swollen by about 500 additional attendees, and short courses related to telecom applications were sold out. But despite the lower attendance this year, “traffic on the exhibit floor was not bad,” according to Scott Walker, director of SPIE corporate services.
Walker attributed the resilience on the SPIE exhibit floor, during a time of widespread market woe, in large part to the annual meeting's focus on research and engineering topics in traditional optics applications. The effects of the market dip seems more isolated to telecom and semiconductor markets, he said, while scientific, engineering and other customers are still buying. He also characterized the exhibit at the SPIE annual conference as one of the last remaining optics shows focusing on optics research and development as opposed to lasers, industrial optics, or even fiber optic applications.
Special events among the 84 technical conferences included three sessions on optical science and metrology at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST; Gaithersburg, MD) in recognition of the institute�s 100th anniversary. Amongst numerous conferences on various aspects of remote sensing, general media attention was drawn to presentations from astrobiology researchers on the topic of extraterrestrial life forms. Researchers supporting the possibility of life on Mars presented evidence gathered from “ancient graphite in the Ukraine, Antarctic depths, extraterrestrial meteorites found on Earth, dust in the upper atmosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope and from Mars itself,” according to Gilbert Levin, CEO of Spherix Incorporated (Beltsville, MD).
Levin asserted, “The researchers provided the strongest evidence to date for primitive life forms on Mars.” Public viewing was also provided for the first time of imagery of the asteroid 433 Eros from the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission.
More down-to-Earth technical presentations included a description of the optical characteristics of mating a touch screen with a full-color active matrix organic light emitting diode (OLED) display. Engineers at Kodak (Rochester, NY) and Sanyo (Osaka, Japan) have mated active-matrix, low-temperature-poly-silicon OLED with touch screen devices, and then investigated the resultant optical properties for various display applications, according to A.D. Cropper who presented results on behalf of his engineering team at Kodak. The team also illustrated Kodak display prototypes with a full-color video of the Disney movie Fantasia. Despite the current developmental stage of much of this work, there is substantial motivation in terms of potential market demand. Touch screen vendors have projected annual revenue to approach $2 billion by 2004, says Cropper. “:As the number of products with displays increases, the opportunity for touch screen interfaces increases.”
Hassaun A. Jones-Bey, senior editor, Laser Focus World