Digital Ink On Billboards

cdneng2 writes "The New York Times has this article on a revolutionary new billboard. It uses digital ink, versus the typical CRT, LCD, Neon, or Plasma displays that are so prominent on the newer billboards that wastes electricity. From the article: 'By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens, rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink - or, as Magink executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.' The billboard can display images at 70 frames per second." You can find more articles on the billboard technology on the Magink website.

Comments

revolutionary? not yet.

[kevin lyda]

it's not revolutionary - there have been stories on /. about this for years. revolutionary would be making a laptop using "digital paper" or whatever they're calling it these days. and would they hurry the fsck up?

combine that with a flash disk or some other form of solid state store and a transmeta or via c3 cpu and you've removed the three biggest power draws on a laptop.

essentially, i'd like a laptop that could do 24 hours w/o ac power.

oh, for older stories on /. about this, see here.

e-books

[martinthebrit]

Does this technology scale down? Could it provide a solution to e-books that provide as enjoyable an experience as dead trees?

Disclaimer: I haven't RTFA'd yet. Better go do that now.

A question

[Matrix2110]

Question: Does anybody know a simple explanation of why they don't go with back lighting or even perhaps rejiggering the dyes and black lighting this?

I guess I am a CRT snob, but I remember an IBM technology demo showing 400DPI. It was loosely based on LCD technology. It was backlit. Of course it did not have the refresh rate that this sign has.

Also notice those page sized tiles in the prototype.

Looks like this technology is heading our way fast.

defaceing?

[Sideswiped]

I have a question. I haven't read into digital ink to any great extent,but I was wondering how easly these things coud be defaced? Do magnetic fields have any effect on these babies? If some sort of a electrical charge was dragged over the board how would this effect the image?

Re:defaceing?

[Generic Guy]

Magnetic fields? I'd be more worried in what happens when teenagers spray paint these things, as they tend to do.

Or thinking more specifically about my area (Detroit), how does this billboard handle a couple of handgun shells unloaded into it?

Re:whitepaper stats

[zakezuke]

Compatibility to outdoor lighting environment

magink's digital ink display billboard is reflective of incident light and requires no integrated illumination. Light that falls on the display from either the sun or external light sources is actually beneficial to the visibility of the image. A beautiful image is maintainable under the full range of daylight conditions.

I have to admit, this idea is attractive to me, though i'm scared at the fact that i'm actually for a form of advertsing technology.

My issue is this... near where I live on I-5 there is a huge graphic display billboard. Not sure if it's plasma or LCD or what, but it's one bright sucker It's so bright infact that driving tward it highlights every nick, scratch, bit of dust on my windshield. The reason I invested in a new windshield infact was due to this ultra bright computer generated sign from hell, esp since they don't automaticly dim the sucker based on accurate "sunset/sunrise" times (based on my observation only).

Now, it's good I replaced my old tattered scrached up windshield, but I shouldn't have to just because of a stupid sign who's technical design by it's very nature requires so much light it's a hazzard to people driving.

Speaking of neon. . .

[ahfoo]

How about using a display like this with flourescent particles and then surrounding it in heavy UV argon/mercury tubes.
I'm just thinking that if it's so much like paper, then that's one of the ways paper billboards are enhanced for better nighttime viewing.
Cartoon images could potentially be quite intense. Think of, for instance, the Simpsons done this way.
But as cool as this is, I still think that in the long-term we're going to see effiecient, mass produced, high powered lasers dominate the outdoor display market and perhaps other display markets as well. But since high powered lasers are still a very long way from cheap at this point, this is a cool near-term solution.

Screw Billboards

[Lord_Dweomer]

What I want is to cover all the walls of my crappy little dorm room with it. How cool would it be to transform your room into a beach. Even cooler would be that it could be animated! I could sit back and watch the waves crash on the shore. Or, if for some reason a female were to come over, I could transform my room into the ultimate bachelor pad simply by changing the display program.

If this were advanced sufficiently, I could then even play bf1942 on this once I realized said female was imaginary and never came over in the first place.

Ads based on what you are listening to

[G4from128k]

The Sept 12 dead tree edition of the Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on companies that deploy billboards that change throughout the day -- one intended application for these digital ink billboards.

The most interesting variant uses a roadside scanner that detects which radio stations are tuned in on the various cars going by the sign. The system then aggregates the data on who is listening to what and decides what ad message to put up. If most people are listening to the game, maybe an ad for the local sports bar will appear. If a cluster of classical music listeners drives past, then an ad for season tickets to the opera might briefly appear.

There's no word on whether the system can tell which MP3 file you are listening to. Yet.

Tile based rendering

[yerricde]

Based on that DPI, at the size of a billboard, i don't know of any videocard in the world that could drive something like that.

OK, one video card probably couldn't handle this resolution, but imagine video cards in a Beowulf cluster. Give each blade the job of driving 1024x1024 pixels' worth of the image, and you have implemented a parallel method of image rendering that is commonly called "tile based rendering".