The Wall Street Journal reports that Google's secretive, hardware-focused laboratory, Google X, has a display division—and it's current working on making giant displays. The head of the division is Mary Lou Jepsen, cofounder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project and founder and former CEO of Pixel Qi, a startup that makes displays that are readable in direct sunlight.
The report says that Google X is hard at work creating "large-scale video displays" that are "composed of smaller screens that plug together like Legos to create a seamless image." The modular design would allow for different screen shapes and sizes, just by moving the modules around.
This sounds like most large-format displays already in existence, such as the Christie MicroTiles pictured above. The Google X difference is that the group is trying to figure out how to make modules without any seams at all. If you look closely at the picture above, you can see the borders around each rectangular module.
The Google X group has apparently managed to poach some engineers from Samsung and Qualcomm, but the report describes the team as "small." Large-format displays are typically used for stadium jumbotrons, digital billboards, and video walls. It's not known what Google would want to do with large-format display technology or who its potential customers might be, but those are all typical questions for anything coming out of Google's mysterious skunkworks.
