Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451,  the 1966 film based on Ray Bradbury's book, depicts a dystopian future where the government's firemen burn books to keep people compliant and illiterate while at the same time providing seamless wall sized video displays to the public, designed to keep the populace happy and compliant while maintaining total control 24/7 over said populace, a vision rather prescient in this writer's opinion given to what's happening in various countries all over the world as we move further into the 21st century.

In the film, the 1984 equivalent to the telescreen is ever present and totally integrated into the living environment, something akin to what Samsung's Micro Leds promise to do when the tech goes live sometime in 2020.

MicroLED is an interesting technology that it seems only Samsung is publicly pursuing at the moment, but two sets it had on display at CES highlighted both its promise and its flexibility. One was a new, bigger version of The Wall that measured an extremely impressive 219 inches; the other was a slightly more practical and much more flexible 75in version aimed at the more typical domestic environment.

This is fabulously flexible. The individual, modular building blocks come in two sections: a back plate that easily hooks into other back plates, allowing customers to build sets in the aspect ratios that suit them (“Ratio Free” sees to be the tagline). Then the actual MicroLED tile simply pops on magnetically.

We don’t often share material made by other sites, but the GIF The Verge put together illustrating how it works is well worth a look to see how easily (and spectacularly) this works in real life.

Modular indeed.