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Are you ready for translucent phones? What about wood or snakeskin? This is the promise of Gorilla Glass 6, the new generation of Gorilla Glass from Corning.
The next-generation display technology, used by Apple and Samsung, accompanies the usual improvements in scratch and impact resistance, but perhaps more exciting is that the glass can also be designed to not look like glass.
At a press event at the Sunnyvale, Calif. Plant, the company introduced new designs that add realistic textures to its glass. It's called "Vibrant" Gorilla Glass, and it was introduced in 2016 with the promise that phone makers could print high resolution images directly on it.
But his latest prototypes take the concept to the next level. The technique combines printed images with frosted glass that is designed to mimic the feel of different textures, such as wood, rock, polished marble, or even snakeskin. The result is a glass that does not look or look like glass.
"The picture is on the back, the texture is on the front, you combine the two and you suddenly changed the way the industrial designers think:" What will my phone look like? "" Corning, director of innovation at Gorilla Glass
It looks like marble, but it's glass
Image : karissa bell / mashable
Not wood but glass 19659008] Image: karissa bell / mashable
It is really remarkable how much the drawings are. Samples that I kept looked like the real textures they looked like. "Wood" looked like wood. "Snake skin smelled like it had real scales.
These are not just Corning has also experimented with a translucent glass, in the event that the manufacturers want to show the intestines of the phone.There are also reflective colors and gradients, in addition to the right image drawings.
all, it's enough customization I wonder if I would even take the worth buying a case for my phone if I had a say in the choice of design.
Gorilla Glass in different color gradients.
Image: karissa bell / mashable
Of course, going without a case is a risk of its own. But Corning may have covered you there too. Gorilla Glass 6 is also the most resistant glass of the company. The new screens should be even more resistant to falls than previous generations, according to the company, which says its new glass can survive 15 drops on "rough surfaces" on average.
Although Corning does not confirm which manufacturers will adopt its latest glass display, the company has confirmed that the first phones to use it will be on the market later this year.
Regarding colored glass, Corning says it's ready for phone makers now; but the big question is whether they will adopt the technology. The company launched its first Vibrant Glass technology in 2016, and we have not yet seen it on consumer phones, although it has been used in some models of laptops.
Image: karissa bell / mashable
Design trends hold, we could see it sooner than later. As my colleague Raymond Wong noted last year, smartphones again become interesting, and this is largely due to the willingness of phone makers to adopt new materials. And, one of the trends we've seen is more glass-back phones (thanks in part to the rise in wireless charging).
What's more, the biggest handset manufacturers are experimenting with color. Samsung has released a version of its S9 in purple, and OnePlus has just shown a red version of its OnePlus6. Even Apple is looking at new colors, if we believe the rumors
Put it all together, and suddenly does not seem at all unlikely that we can soon see more phones in unusual colors or even textures in our future too far away.
