In Corning’s “A Day Made of Glass” videos about glass innovations, you saw a world with seamless delivery of real-time information, where people stay connected through a virtual world at their fingertips, and where everyday surfaces are transformed from one-dimensional utilities into sophisticated electronic devices. It’s a world of mobile communication and connection … and it’s a world made of glass.
“Glass is essential to making this vision a reality,” said Dr. Jeffrey Evenson, senior vice president and operations chief of staff. “Corning’s ability to produce precision glass that is exceptionally slim, flexible, stable, and damage-resistant is enabling a world of life-like images, robust connections, and authentic interfaces.”
If you were one of the more than 23 million people to tune in to the videos about glass innovations, you undoubtedly noticed the highly visual nature of the world they depict. That’s a trend well underway. As displays become more integrated into our daily lives, consumers are demanding sharper pictures, more vivid colors, and faster refresh rates. That comes from smaller, more densely-packed transistors — which places tough demands on display glass.
Corning is leveraging its proprietary fusion process and formulation expertise in glass innovations to produce glass that is exceptionally smooth, dimensionally stable, and capable of handling the extremely high processing temperatures necessary to bring next-generation displays to life.
The videos also portray an extremely mobile world. Today, people expect to do more and more on the go, evidenced by the rapid proliferation of smartphones and tablets. That means devices must not only be touch-friendly and responsive, but also lightweight and durable enough to withstand everyday wear and tear. Corning® Gorilla® Glass set the standard for tough, thin cover glass, and Corning continues to advance the technology and deliver new attributes in glass innovations.
Of course, mobility produces other challenges as well. Perhaps you’ve strained to read your tablet in bright sunlight. Or maybe you’ve heard the alarming statistics about the number of microbes on the average smartphone. Corning is addressing those problems by developing anti-reflective technology and antimicrobial glass — making your smart devices even smarter.
There’s even more going on beneath the surface.
An “always on” world is producing massive amounts of data to store, move, access, and display — straining the capacity of communications networks. As bandwidth demand surges, network providers are turning to optical fiber for its unmatched speed, capacity, and flexibility. Corning scientists invented the world’s first low-loss optical fiber in 1970, and today the company offers a full suite of optical components from fiber-to-the-home, to data centers, to optical connections between consumer devices.
But that’s just the beginning. Corning is exploring applications for Gorilla Glass in industries such as automotive and architecture, building on the company’s long track record in environmental technologies and life sciences to develop solutions that make our air cleaner and our lives healthier, and creating entirely new glass compositions that deliver extraordinary benefits from everyday products.
“We continue to engineer glass at the nano level to solve tough problems and unleash exciting new possibilities,” says Evenson. “Although some of the innovations in our video may be several years away, precision glass continues to improve the way we see, touch, transmit, and process information — in effect, revolutionizing the way people experience the world.”
