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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.
Why is it that nowadays, any new cool thing is invented either for military or advertising use?
The day advertising and the military merge, we'll be in a world of hurt. They'll end up creating a pop-up that kills, I tell ya.
I know what colour I'm painting my walls next week! Every colour of the spectrum, in a slow rotation cycle defined by background noise and controled by my toaster that runs BSD!
Or I could just make a lifesize picture of Morgan Webb.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
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.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Digital ink = finger painting.
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
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.
Print quality image
Combining 5mm pixel pitch, an RGB color model with 4096 colors, and a superior contrast ratio of 14:1, magink digital ink technology achieves an extremely natural look that very much resembles the look of printed images on paper.
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.
Low energy consumption
magink display does not require any power to maintain an image: the image is held under power-off conditions. Only when replacing one image with another does the display require punctual application of power in order to set the new image.
Since energy is needed only for refreshing the image and since magink's digital ink reflective display does not require back lighting, power consumption is low yielding less energy consumption, less heat dissipation and a longer mean time between failure (MTBF).
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Can it be produced cheaply enough -- and with high enough resolution -- to replace wallpaper?
Would it work as a large TV monitor? The frame rate is up to 70/sec, so the question, again, is resolution.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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.
Now, when I'm driving to work in the morning, a huge TV ad can distract me from driving, talking on my phone, reading the paper, shaving, eating, and putting my pants on.
How am I supposed to get ready for work!?
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?
The display requires no power, only when changing images. Images are retained when the power is off.
Does it mean that, when my boss comes into my room and I'm watching pr0n, just turning my laptop off in panic will leave a big pr0n screen still visible?
Not good, not good...
Your Message Here, in a Flash
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
IN an industrial building on the Jersey City waterfront, workers busily printed supersize images for building facades and billboards intended to paper even the most casual viewer with brand awareness. Suspended near the rafters were full-color images of the youth tribes of Gap and giant emblems of National Basketball Association teams; on a far wall a portrait of a Seagram's vodka bottle hung two stories high.
In another corner, near the executive offices of Nomad Worldwide - one of the world's biggest large-format printers of the images that adorn billboards and those vinyl advertisements that wrap around entire buildings - was a different kind of ad, one that Keyvan Ebrahimi, the company's general manager, said might well represent the future of his industry.
"I think it's revolutionary," he said. "It certainly can replace billboards."
Standing on four metal legs, under two banks of fluorescent lights, was what appeared to be a modest-size billboard, measuring about 9 feet wide by 4 feet in height. Across its face, which looks like paper under glass, was a full-color advertisement for a soft drink maker. A few moments later the ad disappeared and was digitally replaced with a different one, and then another, like a screensaver cycling through images on a laptop computer screen.
But the surface of this billboard is not a liquid crystal diode screen - the energy-hungry display common to laptops and increasingly to cellphones, digital cameras, digital organizers and flat-screen computer monitors and television sets. Neither does this billboard share the light-emitting-diode technology that makes million-dollar-plus video screens light up the night in Times Square, Las Vegas and sports arenas around the world.
What makes the electronic billboard in Jersey City possible (and those installed for trials in London, Tokyo, Toronto and Panama City, among other locations) is an innovation by a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink. Its approach to imaging departs from the way most text, graphics and images are electronically presented, including the way expensive plasma screens work, as well as cathode-ray tubes, the old workhorses still found in most television sets and desktop computer monitors.
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.
Ran Poliakine, chief executive of Magink, said the idea was to create visually compelling ads that could be replaced frequently - perhaps hourly, based on consumer response - and could be controlled remotely, all with far less energy and at a far lower cost than a video billboard.
Mr. Poliakine said Magink, which has research operations in England and Israel, was the first company to bring full-color digital ink displays to the marketplace. And soon, he said, its creation will begin competing more directly with traditional billboards in the $19 billion worldwide outdoor-advertising market. Nomad Worldwide, at its Jersey City plant, is among those evaluating the technology's potential.
"The last revolution was computer printing, and we believe the next revolution is digital ink on billboards," Mr. Poliakine said, comparing his company's advances to the first digital printing of billboard images more than a decade ago. Now, he added, his three-year-old company is also studying ways to expand the application of its core technology to personal electronics, including cellular telephones, cameras, hand-held computers and general video displays for laptops and televisions.
Magink prototype screens are capable of displaying video images at more than 70 frames a second, twice th
...runs Windows.
Is this really the best choice for something that thousands (or tens of thousands) of people will see each day as they drive down the highway?
At the PATH terminals in New Jersey, they have "PATHVision" displays. They run Windows. For a long time, virtually every day, pretty much half of the terminals were displaying an error dialog or worse. I also think I saw one of their ticket vending machines displaying a BSoD.
I really wish that companies who come up with stuff this cool would not depend so heavily on Windows. Imagine driving down the highway and seeing a gigantic, 50-foot-wide Blue Screen of Death. If my experiences with the PATHVision monitors were an example of what is to come... well, it could happen!
Here is what happens when airports depend upon Windows...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
5mm =
The smallest frame size is 1m x 2m, so that would be 200 x 400 pixels, bigger than a Palm Pilot and bigger in pixel count but less square than a Zaurus.
4096 colors is low compared to a modern PC.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
video images at more than 70 frames a second, twice the speed needed to produce smooth, cinematic motion
Thats all very well but what are the response times like? Practically all LCDs have a 60fps refresh time, but with a respone of 30ms or more, fast moving images would look horrid, leaving lots of streaks. The article doesn't mention the dot-pitch specs of these digital ink screens either, I'd like to see what sort of resolution and at what size these things could produce. If it had a fast enough reponse you could play Quake III on a 70ft screen!!!
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
A family in their minivan riding down the road, all of a sudden a billboard flashing red and yellow advertising viagra pops out of nowhere distracting hundreds of drivers causing a car accidents all over.
Seriously. Good intention, bad idea. At least it'll give hacker groups the ability to show their views to the world.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Let's try scaling this technology up the curve a little:
- 10-bit color (4096 colors) will become 16-bit and then 24-bit.
- 5mm pixels will become 1mm and then 1/10thmm
- the borders between the pages appear 1 pixel wide, and will thus vanish
- cost of $8,000 will drop to $2,500, then $500.
Yes, looks good!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
A PDA that you can scroll the screen out to a decent size and when finished scroll it up and back into your pocket.
Thank you Lord for SciFi leading the way in Development of technology
- Needleless injections from Startrek
- Personal Communicators from Startrek
- Smokey Screens for projecting images from Seaquest DSV
- Flexible screens from Earth Final Conflict
I am a part time Sci-fi fan, you full time addicts must have some more examples Dont try to think outside the square - Instead realize there are no limitsThe weathers here - Wish you were beautiful
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.
How long before they get sued by someone who crashes their car after being distracted by a moving image one a billboard....
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.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
Ever heard of a silo? ;-)
The truth shall set you free!
Some days my car should be red. Some days blue. Some days a nice mauve. Then polka dots that change colors. How about flames that really flicker? Can't imagine flames on my wagon, but why not? Checkerboard? Heck, you can actually play checkers! Or chess. Or Othello. Backgammon. Hah, you can even play tetris. I can have my phone number flash on the side when I pass a cute girl (oh wait, I drive a wagon). I can have messages flash on the back telling that moron driving 30 in a 50 what I think of them. There's a world of possibilities here!
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Whitepaper mentions approx. 2 second refresh rate. That's a loooooong way from 70 fps. Sounds like some person in the marketing department had a little too much faith in their product.
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
In other words, they failed to get the resolution high enough for use in displays and standard digital paper, and now they only thing it's good for is billboards. Cool, but not nearly as cool as what all the digital ink companies promised we'd have by now.
This can be a little dangerous, if placed near to highways.
If you live in NYC, and have driven down the west side high way, there's a billboard, a tv billboard, which you see when you drive south around 23rd street in Manhattan. Am I the only one who gets a little distracted by these things? Anytime I pass by, I have to make a concerted effort NOT to have my eyes flit back and forth.
What about the ones in Times Square you may ask? They are MUCH MUCH higher up, out of line of sight for drivers. This one is about 3 stories high at about a few hundred feet away from the road. Ideal for drivers watching.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
In this country, we have a few billboards which consist of a row of triangular prisms, disposed vertically, parallel to one another, and able to revolve on spindles. At one end of each spindle is a cog wheel, and a chain connects them all to a motor. As the motor turns, all the prisms revolve together. A limit switch is used to detect when the flat sides line up together. This whole assembly is mounted in a shallow box. Three posters are cut up and slices of each affixed around the prisms in such a way that at each of the limit stops, a complete poster is visible. A cyclic timer relay closes briefly to start the motor every few seconds; the limit switch keeps it running until it hits a stop position.
I believe this kind of sign is not allowed near busy road junctions.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Shades of Minority Report...
But imagine the possibilities.
A series of sci-fi books by Stephen Baxter (The Manifold Sequence) describe technology like this.
They use flat, flexible view screens that can be used anywhere.
This is very exciting.
But of course it will be used for advertising...
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'm curious about the "tiny helix-shaped particles." What the heck are they?
computerlady - a brand new Slash-daughter - alone, but no longer invisible, in the
The obligatory Minority Report reference here for future advertising.
Now with RFID technology, adds can be specifically directed at individuals. Brrrr.
..........FULL STOP.
I remember seeing this technology well over a year ago (maybe 2 or 3) where they were using this "smart paper" for electronic price tags in stores. As prices changed (e.g. for a sale) the store computer would simply send a signal to the paper to change the content.
This was only available in black and white (well black and light grey anyway) but they were discussing how to do colour back then. This is mealy an extension of that technology.
This will be interesting for making redundant traditional billboards as they it will reduce the costs involved in bill posting (at the expense of jobs (I imaging) but that's technology) and obsolete billboards which display multiple adverts (usually by having a motorised system of rotating panels). Never the less I can't see it replacing certain screens in Time Square and London's Piccadilly as motion video still packs a greater advertising punch.
Now the only question is that when the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) complains that an adverts content is too raunchy and should be removed (e.g. those wonderbra adds that allegedly caused car crashes through driver distraction), can be removed as soon as the decision is taken which will either cause a reduction or a dramatic increase in shock advertising).
Oh well time will tell.
Just my 0.02
If you get modded down for a first post... What do you get for a last post?
See Don't Touch that Radio Button, You're on Billboard Detection for a freely accessible version of this story. It sounds like the system can detect leakage from car radio antennas, although some people are skeptical of its accuracy.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
it will dissappear very quickly, and wind up hung on my bedroom wall.. hee hee.. anybody have a flatbed truck in the virginia area?
I'm glad this is finally ready for an application. Mainly because it's a reflective rather than emissive display. That means when ambient light is brighter, so is the display, so it should look fine in sunlight. This is unlike CRTs and backlit LCDs which look washed out in bright light. This would free us nerds from lurking in dimly lit, mushroom-conducive workspaces. None of which is to say that this company has finally "solved" the problem, but a first real application is a big step!
The article describes the billboard as "...an innovation by a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink."
Lucky they mentioned that. At first I thought the name was a combination of the words "Ma" and "Gink".
TYFYA,
--#>SurturZ
"That seems to be an issue nobody addressed, but if it is this seems like technology the military could use to create active camouflage. Just take a pic of the view opposite the direction the vehicle is traveling and display it on the front and vice versa."
Hello Cloaking Device! Now if only they'd invent transporters...
It has the appearance of an LCD with it's poor viewing angle.
This is entirely the point. If only one driver can see the ad at a given time, the billboard owner can sell more targeted advertising space based on the make and model of the car approaching the billboard.
Besides, LCD viewing angles have got a lot better over the past years. Even in mid-1999, when Rose-Hulman was putting together Acer TravelMate 721TX laptop bundles for its incoming freshmen, the viewing angles were wide enough not to cause a problem.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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".
Will I retire or break 10K?
Imagine the teenagers of the future... leaving the gift that keeps on giving. They could have graffiti that changes by remote control.
... or the nastiness that could happen?
Imagine a national press conference and suddenly, the wall behind the speaker changes to show a particularly embarrassing photo from the speakers' past. The networks would probably be in delay, so they might have a chance to roll to another camera. Think of the fun you could have?
-- No sig for you!
I park my car in the middle of summer. As I get out and lock up, the car senses the temperature and time of day, the body turns white and the windows all go mirror-refelctive. When I get back, the inside of the car is ambient air temperature instead of 140F.
In the winter, the car body goes black and the windows stay clear, keeping the inside warm and reducing the snow and ice buildup.
In either case, I come out of the shopping center, push a button on my keychain, and the car's color starts flashing between international orange and white/black. Quieter than chirping the horn/alarm, and works better in daylight than flashing the headlights.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Does this mean in the future, my monitor might become a big $500 color magnadoodle?