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Technology

Wafer-Thin Display Unit 70

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-see dept.
RicRoc writes "E Ink is showcasing a 4 by 6 foot, 3 millimeter thick, flexible display. The press release is here. " Its an interesting technology. Looks like it has a ways to go, but big flat, ambiently lit screens would be smooth on the eyes.
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Wafer-Thin Display Unit More

Wafer-Thin Display Unit

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  • Wearables? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wearable?, HAH! I want clothing made of it!

    Imagine a camoflage jacket for the military.

  • Useful for store signs.... hehe (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They had the JCPenny person gushing about how their employees could spend more time taking care of customers than changing signs. (in other words, fewer jobs but hey what else is new)

    I can see it now:
    Associate: "That'll be $32.59."
    Customer: "Um. I think that's wrong. The sign over there says '20% OFF'."
    Associate: Typing on keyboard. *clickity clickity clickity*
    "No it doesn't."



  • Re:Wearables? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This could change the face of fashion forever. Imaging asking someone to bend over so you could write a document on the back of their T-shirt!!

    You could watch TV on your stomach!

    I kind of like the idea of chameleon clothing though..

  • be patient (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    well. actually you ought to be amazed of how fast this electronic ink turns from a lab prototype to an actual produt.

    next target will be finer grain. than more grey scale.

    than come color. after that...come speed, so it might work as good as laptop passive matrix.

    why do you want this?..well first it's cheap. imagine buying monitor by the square feet like buying carpets.

    give it 5 years, yo be seeing house that has active wall paper. yikes....



  • Don't get your undies in a bunch (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Heres the low down on it: http://www.signweb.com/buy-guides/99/mvgmsg990202. html
    It's not as great as you think. It's two different colors. It's like painted ping pong balls. Only one colored side shows. So either blue/white or black/white or red/black. You get the picture. So no Quake on screen, and no posters in your room that one minute is a car and when your parents leave a porn pic. It just does text for now :-(

    -Matt

  • Electronic Ink (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 04, 1999 @02:57PM (#1904709)
    The implications of this technology are staggering! Here's the technical info from MIT (who are currently developing the technology even further)..

    http://www.almaden.ibm.com/ journal/sj/363/jacobson.html [ibm.com]
  • Um.. as I recall, this stuff is actually roll-up, thats why the hanging signs were curved. I also think it's just 2 color, but what I know about this stuff is mostly based on an old scientific american. What they do is make tiny colored balls, one side colored black with a positive charge, and the other side white with a negative charge. Then, when you put a charge though the sheet, the little balls re-align themselves.
  • Not this guy again... He used to hang out in sci.robotics or something like that, he could never be convinced that he's wrong... pissed of the whole newsgroup. Although he seems to have toned down his ideas somewhat, but it still looks like he hasn't got a good system for controlling the robots.

  • Does that mean that anyone with a magnet or anything that produces an electric charge can easily alter the little ball thingies?

    raises some interesting possiblities... at least any damage would be easy to 'clean up'.
  • Am I the only one who's waiting for a t-shirt or jacket made of this material? Of course it'd probably be a legal nightmare if you got sued by the people who drove off the road while watching the scrolling message on your back...
  • You are aware that your CRT displays color using three separate pixels, right? There's nothing that would prevent them from putting multi-colored balls in clusters...
  • http://www.salonmagazine.com/tech/log/1999/05/04/d igital_ink/index.html

    Salon magazine has a story about how that device will first be used to display signs over the JC Penny's sports departments.

    --

  • I suppose that if you polarise the light being reflected in some fashion (alternating lines/pixels?) and wore polaroid glasses, it would very much work like a holodeck. Of course, you wouldn't be able to touch the images; the effect would be more like Captain Eo.

  • Yeah, people have been researching this for years, but there's a big difference between "some people in an R&D lab came up with this" and "this is available commercially now."

  • Wrestling mat material? If it is that durable, imagine the fun at parties expanding from that game "twister."

    Twister used to be a popular game where two people got on a mat in contortionist postitions determined by spinning the wheel of hand/feet locations. A riot. :)

    Imagine a webcam based game of this where people across the world determine how twisted you get with your partner...

  • If you've played Metal Gear Solid, I imagine you know already what I'm talking about. I want Otakon's Camouflage suit!! This is the first step toward exactly that! (for those of you who haven't palyed Metal Gear Solid, if you've seen the Predator, when it's invisible (in the movie), it's basically the same thing.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Someday I'm going to have a display the size and shape of a drafting table. I'll be able to use a stylus with it, and I'll be able to hang another one just like it on the wall next to it, and be able to flick windows from one to the other at will. Like a cross between a Palm Pilot and a white board, but better than either...
  • Diamond age, here we come. Ads on chopsticks. Every surface moving, with ads. Ads. Ads.
  • Nothing really to write home about. It's blocky, monochrome, useful only on a large level, and it's not that impressive. It's a step, but a small step. When they can get multiple colors or a finer definition, then I'll start paying attention.
    -S. Louie
  • IIRC, the article stated that they were working on a system with three colors, so that it would work just like a television (which uses three colors), or a printer, etc. I think enough time has passed between then and now for an advance from 2 color.

    But I'm just trying to remember from that old article, too. I don't have it around anymore.

    That's all I remember, and it may well prove to be more than I remember.

  • Hopefully the next step will be a curtain monitor so I can play Quake3 on my wall.


    You could do this with a projection system; IIRC the pricing on these was semi-sane (though still several $k), and they aren't intrinsically expensive to build. In fact, it might be cheaper to use a projector for very-large displays. I'd like to see more research done on this, but projectors don't seem to be in vogue at the moment :).

  • Fantastic Article. I recommend reading it. It really explains the concept well.
  • I live about 40 minutes from the J.C. Penney store where this was set up, and I went to see it last night (Wednesday). Of the 4'-by-6', only a small region was used for displaying letters, maybe 1'-by-2'. The rest had no obvious function and might have been control circuitry. The thing was obviously bowed and looked flexible. The lettering was white on blue, and it changed a little slowly, like LCD displays. Contrast ratio was quite good, it was clearly visible from 50' away. It was suspended near the ceiling and I couldn't get a good close look at it.

    It's admittedly quite mundane in its current role. It just flashes ads at shoppers and is functionally no more interesting than a TV screen. Letters appeared in a fixed grid, like the LCD screen of a pocket organizer, with four or five lines of text and maybe 40 characters across. But the Media Lab vision of an electronically downloadable book is very cool. I like the physical simplicity of the thing, with the rotating black/white spheres. If they need to do boring stuff with it to finance the more interesting plans, I can live with that.

    Anybody got enough optics background to know if the resolution is good enough for holography? A downloadable hologram (maybe as the display for a VRML viewer) would be way wicked cool.

  • From what i've gathered it's monochrome, depending on its refresh rate i'm wondering if it couldnt be rigged up to the linux console.
  • Now this is what I've always wanted and more. I had always imagined something between the main point of this article and the link you show here. I've always wanted to be able to sit down and read a book in the lay-z-boy that I've just downloaded off the net. Try doing that with your laptop. And how they do it is incredible. Sign me up, I'll buy one. I don't care if it's not color... this is exactly what we need to practically eliminate paper consumption. Hey, newspapers would literally disappear in their traditional sense. Download the paper everyday and you can still read it at lunch. I think this could one of the more revolutionary things to come down the pipe in a long time.


  • "E Ink is showcasing a 4 by 6 foot, 3 millimeter thick, flexible display. The press release is here."

    It depends on what you mean by "display". It's hard to tell from the pics, but if you look closely, I think the sign is a hack of many smaller displays. The individual displays *are* flexible, and the tech is kinda cool and a promising possibility, but there's some PR shuckin' and jivin' going on.
  • Hmm..
    "Immedia products solve this problem by including a wireless pager and Internet software so the retailer can remotely change messages in seconds, whether in a single store or across the entire retail chain."

    Ok, so how long until someone figures out how to override the "wireless pager" system and send it signals so that the ads are all replaced with porn, or some other message.
  • Electronic ink is practically worthless for computer displays, like Matt said it's monochrome and doesnt have the world's greatest resolution. I'm waiting for LEP(Light Emitting Polymers)s to become more refined. Right now they are only functional in sizes and resolutions of your digital alarm clock. But it's being worked on. When LEps get to the resolution of current LCD monitors they will require about a tenth of the power and be about 10 times cheaper. Besides the LEPs electrically conductive polymers will make electronics super light. You'd be able to make an entirely plastic-read:flexible and realy light-circuit board. mmmm...Polymer microchips...75% less heat at the same power levels and frequencies. If you think .18 micron dies are small think of molecule wide circuits. Something the size of a PII chip could have as many transistors as a few hundred PIIs.
  • I've been using my plasma display since 1990 (it was a used P70) and another since 1992 (a used PS/2 P75). They are still running fine.

    Biggest problem is that plasma doesn't do low-intensity very well. Other than that, they are a dream come true for my otherwise abused eyes.

  • I'm thinking that the best use will be for
    more rugid and durable, lighter cheaper
    laptops. Just think of a laptop smaller and
    as flexible and durable as a paper notebook.

    something that you could actually take to class
    and could conform to and sit easily apon your lap.

    just a thought.

    -Z
  • I was hoping to see a flexible monitor, but I guess this is only supposed to be used for marquee type of stuff. Still, a pretty good step forward. Hopefully the next step will be a curtain monitor so I can play Quake3 on my wall.
  • let them develop the following. I read in a scientific newspaper they planned to make screen with 3 primary colors, that way we will have real color display

    and the refresh rate is about 30 pics / sec so thats a good beginning
  • best use will be huge screens on walls (imagine a 3 feet per 5 feet display :-))

    and that's cool TV sets...
  • I'll be able to have a desk which is a computer dusplay. The resolution will be so hegh that I will not see any difference between the paper document and the digital document (besides the fact one has 3 dimensions...)

    No more monitor, no more mouse or keyboard, just the table covered by a touch-screen layer. I am waiting this for years... and it comes closer, cool !
  • but it is not
  • 2 years ago I read an article in a serious scientific newspaper that people were creating some sort of new speaker.
    That uses a simple flat panel (no folding) and the whole surface is used as a panel, Then you can use ads panels, paintings, ceiling panels or whatever you want that is flat...

    Mix both technologies... hmmm cool
  • but of course the people that finally developed and released it weren't Xerox. The poor guy at PARC that invented and implimented it for the first time never got them to do anything with it (even after 20 years).

    "Electronic ink? Wait, then people won't need photocopiers! Our sales will plummet! I think we should sit on this idea. Throw it in the secret vault with the other fourteen million mindnumbingly cool ideas that'll never see the light of day."

    cygnus
    "i feel like a quote out of context."

  • give it 5 years, yo be seeing house that has active wall paper. yikes....

    I've always wanted active wallpaper. I think that a nice blue/black gradient on the walls and a starfield overhead would be most soothing. But no, I have to settle for purple walls and a dark teal ceiling. Paint is so limiting.


    Mike
    --

  • 2 people??? Although the games tend to be a bit more short-lived, 4 is much better. Allows a thinning of the ranks.
  • That's really a fantastic article about electronic ink. 5 pages worth. Now I really understand what is this "digital ink" and how it works. I think there is many many applications we can find for that.. I imagine reading web pages previously fetched in a kind of electronic book when I go back from school every day in the bus... Something that won't break if I drop it in my school bag ;-)
  • Wired [wired.com] has a long, excellent feature article [wired.com] on Electronic Ink.

    The Article is dated 5/97, so it's a few years old, but if you're looking for a longer discussion, and more information on the technology, it's a good place to start.

    I've been waiting for digital ink since May, 1997. Looks like only a few more years now!

  • I'm glad to see I'm not the only person who thought of this. I can see a combo of this technology with scanner technology. Then you have a real time scan of the light coming at you and being shown in the exact 180 degree position on the 'fabric' screen so you become effectively invisible. Of course, bending the light waves like the Predator suit would be cool too.

  • What I'm waiting for is something that will let me tell other drivers what I'm really thinking about them, rather than just yelling out the window.

    "Excuse me, sir. Your engraved invitation to proceed through the greenlight was lost in the mail, so you'll have to make do with this poor substitute."

    Think ... no more road rage ...

    OK, maybe not.

  • Forget the monitor replacements, I want a full-color suit, with a connector in the jacket pockets so I can drop my Palm III in and have it scroll through some random graphics and text.

    Funny thing is, back in the day of 80's Miami Vice neon colors, I used to ask people to take the batteries out. Now I'll be putting them in.

    "Let's go out!"
    "Hold on, I'm charging my jacket."

  • Just out of curiosity, how do the plasma displays hold up? I heard in a talk a few years ago from someone working on them that sputtering would eventually degrade the pixels' performance, and that they were trying to find ways to beat that problem. (I remember him mentioning that the time scale for the degradation was on the order of years--I assume they got that problem licked)?

    Thanks.
  • Gee, I love posting replys to my own replys, oh yes, very thrilling. In any event, Now that I think about my original reply, what is this "invisible suit?" Heh, because it reminds me about the emperor's new clothes. Sure he's got clothes on, you just can't see it, after alln only the smart ones can see it. I shoulda said something more along the lines of "a suit that makes you invisible". Otherwise some people may take it the wrong way. not a suit that you can see through, but instead a suit that makes others see through you. Makes more sense now doesn't it? I hope so
  • If these types of displays do use more than one color, it seems as though it could eb used as some type of dynamic camoflage.

    Suppose you're flying in your new jet fighter and you're being pursued by one of those crazy nuts with air-rage. Your jet could be changing it's color as you fly over the terrain with the assistance of a couple tiny cameras on the other side.

    Something that might pose a severe problem is if they incorperate that idea into cars. Heh, You'll see the automotive accident rate go up and the occurance of speeding ticket's go down. Although, I suppose the police would start installing radar systems similar to the one you'll find in that new jet fighter of your's. Pray to GOD that they don't install heat seeking missles though.

    BUT, what I really want is that invisible suit that can be bought in one of the many popular men's dressware stores. Need some more advances in vid-cam technology to get smaller cameras that could be embedded in the display and you'll be sneaking unseen into the girls locker rooms, hehe. Becareful though, you're principle might shop at the same men's store. One problem is they might hear you comin. Maybe a sound cancelation device would be good, too. Man I love technology.
  • You could watch TV on your stomach!

    Oh no real live Teletubbies!

  • On the surface, this sounds bogus - but the idea is sane (or maybe not, take a look for yourself):

    Fractal Robots [robodyne.com]
  • I'm still waiting for a roll-up display like the TV curtain in Back to the Future 2.

    ..To be Concluded
  • I got the impression that this was more like a wrestling mat type of material.. I was thinking along the lines of a curtain that could be rolled up. This mat stuff might be kinda cool for high school wrestling teams, though.. advertise while your school competes.
  • Good idea.. or you could expand the idea of glass cielings to the other way around, with small camaras strategically placed in the room.. coming soon in cheap motels everywhere!

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