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Printing Out A New Monitor
wackypak writes: "Seiko / Epson have developed a new technology which allows it to print out a video screen onto paper! Believe it or not, they've even demoed the technology, and hope to use it for mobile phones! This may be the death of paper as we know it -- imagine being delivered an electronic video newspaper every morning, then *recycling* it. Or even delivering your speech as a multimedia piece of paper! Or having walls and walls of video wallpaper!" Or ending more sentences with exclamation points!
Interesting... What other uses might a screen like this have?
First off, I expect rapid development of resolution, blue LEP lifespans, modularity, chip embedding, wireless broadband(streaming), and physical properties like flexibility, elasticity, heat and cold resistance, waterproofing, etc.
Ten years after something like this comes to market, it will seem like the blink of an eye, a couple product generations go by and wham! this tech is now ubiquitous and has amazing, undreamed of applications.
One thing people will probably do is wallpaper everything in it: house, car, tennis racket, shoes, shirt, bathing suit area. This technology will also lend itself to vandalism nicely. imagine slapping a 40" square sheet, looping video of pr0n or subversive images on the back of a bus? on the side of a politicians limo? all over a building!
But what to play on these displays? The trippy nebulous winamp plugin style would get old quick. Anything curvy like clothing would distort video, making video look surreal, and making surreal movie footage that much stranger. Looping footage of stars, fire and clouds are likely to be popular. But that still won't be enough. Designers will embrace it, and produce some wonderful combinations of color and tone, but that still won't be enough.
Fairly quick into this, I expect the military to adopt this into cheap and easy mimetic armor systems. This might lead back to consumerville in the form of very sophisticated mood clothing, that matches both your mood and the room you are in. Through practice you could learn to manipulate the clothing to convey subtle accents or advertise a specific mood. this would eventually add another dimension to human interaction. Perhaps a more polite and subtle culture would blossom around this...
There will obviously be styles that come and go, but certain things will remain relatively constant. If displays like this are adopted as the de facto standard for building adornment, there will be a pronounced change in architectural styles, marking the shift in epoch clearly.
Off the top of my head, I imagine buildings would become bland and featureless, possibly made of raw concrete with smooth sections prepared for the display coating.
After a collapse in our civilisation, future generations would think of our's as a hard and ugly era, though in reality everything will be flamboyent to the point of overstimulation and madness!
damn, I should write this stuff down!
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
On the individual side, the idea of a flatscreen TV hanging on the wall may become a reality far sooner now. And, if the technology is truly as "cheap" as they say it is, the I'd like to see embedded displays in car dashboards, or as a "heads up" display on an unused portion of the windshield. Volume controls on the dashboard may be replaced with control buttons for map displays.
Coupled with "netcasting" and GPS, a cellular or narrowband radio could be used to even SHOW YOU where you are on a map, accurately, and quite visibly. Traffic delays and accidents could come up in realtime as coloured areas to avoid if possible.
Hell, the possibilities of this are pretty much endless, so I'll stop here.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Um, excuse me, but I think Apple invinted this back in the early 80s. Its called a laser printer and WSYWIG. =-)
-My homework crashed.
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"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?