Well now the future could hold new possibilities for smartphones if the latest discovered technology is picked up by smartphone makers, a tech that apparently would have the LCD on your device grab its energy right from sunlight enabling to actually charge itself.

According to an article over on Engadget, engineers at UCLA have come up with a concept that involves LCDs having built in photovoltaic polariser, which will apparently enable the device to “convert ambient light, sunlight and their own backlight into electricity.”

Apparently these guys have created a new energy harvesting polariser for LCDs that they have named a polarising organic photovoltaic, and this new piece of tech can apparently give a boost to an LCD as it has the potential to work as a polariser, an ambient light or sunlight photovoltaic panel and a photovoltaic device simultaneously…yep that’s all beyond me too.

Here’s what a professor of materials science at UCLA Engineering and principal investigator on the research, Yang Yang says, “I believe this is a game-changer invention to improve the efficiency of LCD displays. In addition, these polarizers can also be used as regular solar cells to harvest indoor or outdoor light. So next time you are on the beach, you could charge your iPhone via sunlight.”

According to the researchers, current LCDs are inefficient with the device’s backlight consuming in the region of 80% to 90% of the power and as much as 75% is lost via the polarisers, however apparently the new polarising organic photovoltaic LCD can possibly recover a lot of that unused energy.

Yang also stated, “In the near future, we would like to increase the efficiency of the polarizing organic photovoltaics, and eventually we hope to work with electronic manufacturers to integrate our technology into real products. We hope this energy-saving LCD will become a mainstream technology in displays.”

So there you have it if you understood all that tech speak, but basically I think at some point in the future we could see smartphones and other devices sport new self energising LCDs, which should mean the user doesn’t have to charge the device so often, and that has to be a good thing right?

Don’t go getting your hopes up for this new tech to hit the mobile space any times soon though as no doubt just like most technical stuff it will take some time to materialise in the mobile arena.