control?
Hmm wonder how you could control the display (ie go to the next page) still sounds promising!
Brainboxes in Ohio say they have ended the tablet wars before they've even really begun. No more will harassed consumers need to weigh up the benefits of e-ink versus LCD or LED vid-capable screens. No more will bank accounts be plundered by the need to purchase costly glass-based displays of either type. Instead, no more than …
This development is significant and substantial. It will enrich content (as well as the environment) like never before - especially in educational sectors and media. I look forward to the unexpected applications that rear their heads... eg, clothing with displays, sign posts, interactive displays, interactive wall paper, adaptive camoflauge on vehicles/clothing, interactive floor tiles which light up (a la Michael Jackson's video), etc. The possibilities are staggering with something that is so much cheaper to product and implant into surfaces.
I have followed e-paper for a while on sites such as newscientist and IEEE spectrum and of course elReg - This is a game changer for sure!!!
Adverts and stupid displays, all the shite we could do with less of!
So we finally start to make a difference in keeping poly-bags out of the landfills, now we have to deal with the ad-agencies pumping out tons of e-waste, electro-paper cack full of pointless drivel, all to make a few bucks!
Glad your so happy about bending the environment over, for one more rodgering!
This is one of those classic bits of tech (like flying cars and wristwatch phones) that are regularly announced as going to change the world in a few years.... yet never actually materialize.
Get back to me when it's actually really, really possible - not just a glimmer in a boffins eye.
were done in the 50s and will decrease in cost and apparent (i.e. user-visible) complexity as UAV tech gets better understood and becomes more mainstream. They're more "roadable plane" or "car-cross-paraglider" but still- it's a car that can be flown.
Wristwatch phones have been around for years and can be had for like £60 now (as an example, http://www.gadgetsnstuff.co.uk/product293427_656379.aspx).
Better examples would be Jetpacks (which aren't commercially available) or Nuclear Fusion (which has been 30 years away from large-scale power generation for the last 50 years).
"This is one of those classic bits of tech (like flying cars and wristwatch phones) that are regularly announced as going to change the world in a few years.... yet never actually materialize."
Wristwatch phones have been around for several years.... :
http://www.sweet-gadgets.co.uk/detail.php?prodID=135
So "Brainboxes in Ohio" have found a way to replace reusable pieces of tech like Tablets with a rubbish generator like epaper, that you can just 'throw away' at the end of the week. More Electronic junk for the pile.
Morally corrupt? Electronic Trash? Disposable hype that might never really take off?
... We'll always have Paris
Once you have a disposable paper based e-display, you still need some means of controlling and powering it.
Until negligibly cheap, paper thin, batteries and control circuitry can also be added, it will need some kind of housing, immediately making it pretty pointless to use rollable flexible paper.
"Until negligibly cheap, paper thin, batteries and control circuitry can also be added, it will need some kind of housing, immediately making it pretty pointless to use rollable flexible paper."
An Israeli outfit do paper based batteries which don't need a case (electrolyte dissolved in middle paper layer).
The chip transistors remain a problem.
Plastic Logic anyone?
But will it be soft enough to wipe your arse with? You could be sat on the bog reading an article and when you've finished said article, recycle it as toilet paper.
Funny that, that's what we used to do it in the 50s & 60s with the News of the Word. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
One of the biggest complaints against the current e-readers are they are not like books.
This technology would be great to get over that issue.
Imagine a real "book" made from sheets of this new paper.
You load up a story, the text is written to each side of the sheets in the book and you read it...like a proper book.
I find the idea quite tantalising. Some people may say "Well what's the point of that?".
Reading a book is a tactile thing as well as the act of reading.
People like the smell of a new book, the feel of the binding, turning the pages.
If you can replicate this experience and make a book effectively "programmable", I can see that taking off.
Good luck to them.
It would be a good idea to go with a flexible, very cheap, broadly available and in principle recyclable core substrate.
So much display tech *looks* promising until you see the $100m ultra high vacuum processing hardware to make the substrate (which it usually turns out needs to handle 500c+ processing while flattening it to a surface roughness < 1/2 a wavelength of light) work.
This stuff looks a little more room temperature with equipment in the 1000, rather than the 100s of 1000s.
But it's still a *long* way from something in a catalogue. LCD is no longer alone and others have already got some traction.
Cautious thumbs up. No certainty we'll hear *anything* more from it.
in the e-reader postulated imho. Add weight to the above cited problems. There may be other applications for the technology but then I must say I like what's printed_on paper to stay_printed on it.
The multitude of e-readers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_e-book_readers ) and their advancing hardware and programmability ( limited mainly by one fundamental but correctable flaw as far as I can see* btw ) will speed their market penetration such that the " scroll " project will be irrelevant. If the Ohio boffins are lucky, it may be a first step to somewhere else.
* Interested ?