Today, we'll look at another new display technology -- or is it? Pioneered by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), it's called SmartPaper. Patrick Houston has the story.
A sheet of SmartPaper consists of two pieces of mylar plastic sandwiching millions of tiny polymer beads encapsulated in an oily medium. Each bead is a hair-like 100 microns in diameter. Each is white on one side, black on the other. But what really makes these beads so special is that each one carries a positive charge on one side and a negative one on the other. Pass an electric current over the paper, and you can rotate each encapsulated bead to -- voila! -- create an image.
Early next year, a two-year-old PARC spinoff, Gyricon Media of Ann Arbor, Mich., plans to launch four beta tests using SmartPaper for signs in retail stores. The Gyricon system consists of software and a network of wirelessly connected SmartPaper signs.
[Details and images are available at Gyricon Media.]
As Gyricon President Dr. Iva Wilson explains, SmartPaper owns several advantages, especially for rendering relatively static content, such as signs or book pages.
One, it's reflective, like paper. You don't need a backlight, and, unlike an LCD, you can view it from an angle and in bright sunlight. Two, unlike a digital display that must be refreshed dozens of times per second, electronic paper is "bi-stable." This means that once you arrange the beads, they remain that way until you rearrange them.
If you're a math whiz, you've already figured out that one plus two equals low power consumption. Electronic paper will run on regular batteries for a long, long time.
And what does this mean? Low prices.
Will they succeed? I'm not convinced. E Ink Corporation, a spin-off from the MIT, has similar products on the market, but I haven't seen them at my favorite electronics store -- yet.
Source: Patrick Houston, ZDNet AnchorDesk, November 3, 2002
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