This gamer's secret weapon: Glass

Glass is the best bet for crisp displays and vibrant colors. In large-screen displays, glass makes games arena-like. And it’s durable for mobile gaming. With antireflective and anti-glare elements, glass feels like it’s invisible.

You might not see the Corning name printed on those components, but Corning’s glass and other materials play a vital role in all the above. Corning is crucial to your device’s display, but the company is also crucial to making the microchips in your graphics processing unit (GPU) and the optical fiber that brings high-speed internet to your home.

Putting it simply, games were meant to be played with glass.

Display matters

As an experienced techie, Joulez values glass because it enables OLED, a cutting-edge display made up of a stack of glass layers that transmit electroluminescence. OLED offers exceptional picture quality, delivering vibrant colors and high resolutions.

“Everything in the house is OLED because I'm looking for in-depth, rich colors,” Joulez said. “The blacks are black and the colors are actually vibrant.”

With the proper visual fidelity, colors can be seen how they were intended to be seen. OLED offers “true black” because it turns off the light source for a black pixel, rather than mixing colors for black. And gamers can get lost in a world created for their own exploration.

“OLED certainly offers stunning display performance for immersive viewing,” said Corning’s Vincent Tsai, Director of Product Engineering for Display Commercial Technology. “Gamers also can’t go wrong with some of today’s high-resolution, high-performance LCD displays. Corning’s fusion-formed display glass enables a wide variety of screens that deliver exceptional refresh rate, color performance, and resolution, and the advancements just keep coming.”

Glass that goes anywhere you game

How many times have you picked up a mobile device and seen your reflection on the black screen? With plain glass displays, that’s inevitable. But for serious gamers like Joulez, who even positions his lamps strategically to avoid glare, glass treatments make all the difference.

When Joulez selects his equipment, he checks for anti-glare and anti-reflective surface treatments. These treatments can help ensure that you’re seeing the display in its clearest state – nearly devoid of distractions. Corning’s Gorilla Glass business has a full portfolio of durable surface treatments designed to enhance display interfaces for the ultimate user experience.

“With anti-glare, we’re creating peaks and valleys on a formerly flat glass surface to make it appear ‘matte,’. These surface features scatter light rays, rather than bouncing back to your eye,” says Hal Cutler, Senior Product Line Manager, Gorilla Glass. “This helps eliminate distracting visual artifacts caused by glare on the screen.

And while you’d think plastic could be comparable when it comes to texture, glass is far superior, Cutler says.

“The cool thing about applying surface treatments to Gorilla Glass is that we apply our ion-exchange process after we do our proprietary anti-glare treatment. This makes sure your glass is anti-glare and durable.”

Corning also provides anti-reflective glass composites and surface treatments, and even the sun doesn’t stand a chance.

Usually, when you’re outside, you might have to adjust where you’re standing, or adjust your device’s brightness, to be able to see your device’s display clearly.

“With anti-reflective coatings, the cover glass reflects less ambient light to your eyeballs and allows for more of that light from the display,” Carlo Kosik-Williams, Director, Thin Films & Coatings, says. “This allows the actual image to be transmitted through so you can see it better, even in a bright setting.”

Corning’s advancements are major for the future of mobile gaming.

“Essentially what we’re trying to do: we're trying to make the glass surface invisible,” Kosik-Williams says.

Stronger computing for better graphics

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are the basis of modern gaming. GPUs are sought after for their ability to process many pieces of data simultaneously. Gamers place the most emphasis on GPU quality – both in its memory and the microchips that make them work.

Glass is essential for GPUs, whether it’s the GPU in a gamer’s computer or on the data-center server that’s allowing gamers to play collaboratively.

Corning supplies glass materials and components for nearly every step of the semiconductor-chip manufacturing process.

As features on chips get smaller and GPUs grow more powerful to meet the world’s ever-increasing computing demands, Corning’s glass materials and processes remain critical.

Beastly data centers make gaming social

“When you’re gaming, even if you’re fully immersed, you’re not alone,” Joulez says. “Video games are social. You’re connecting with others.”

Believe it or not, glass plays a part here, too.

Glass optical fiber brings data to and from your home. Fiber connects gamers to data centers, and therefore other players. This network of information brings gamers closer to their opponents and teammates – and fast.

“In the pandemic, that quick connection with others really helped me find cool people who were on the same journey as me,” Joulez says.