Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?" `":" #");}
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...
...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
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
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.
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!
>> Would it work as a large TV monitor? The frame rate is up to 70/sec, so the question, again, is resolution.
This link mentions resolutions in the range 120-150 dpi, but AFAIR one of the first EInk demo screens had about 300 dpi resolution (as a laser printer)
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
response time is different from refresh, i'll explain. If you take a normal LCD they usually have a 60Hz refresh and say 25-30ms response. What this means is that the LCD can show 60 different frams every second. However, the response time measures how long it takes for the LCD to change frames, the longer the time the longer the last image that was on the LCD is displayed, so if you have a high response time (25ms is considered normal but not good) then you will get "streaking" effects, where the previous frames overlap with the new frames. This can cause a horrible image and is very noticeable when the frames are very different e.g. fast motion graphics (films, games). Newer LCDs report a 16ms response, which makes streaking almost invisible in most cases. So you see, this is why I wanted to know what the response of the ink is.
Also you may be wondering about TVs and their response time, T.Vs and Monitors (CRT) don't have a response time (or more to the point its the same as the refresh) because on a CRT screen the previous frame is not remembered as the "pixels" on a CRT so to speak, need to be constatly energised to display anything, so the second that the cathode ray stops hitting the phosphor the image dissapears, thus no reponse time.
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
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
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...
I can see one major problem with this fantasy: digital ink is not a light-emitting medium. Nerds will be distracted and confused by the necessary blinding abundance of what we call "room lighting."
...
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.
It is made from two pannels with particals between them.
This is essentially the paper.
The particals are coloured Red/Green/Blue on one side and Black on the other.
A static charge can cause a partical to rotate in it's position between the layers and show for instance either red or black.
Now just think of these as pixels and you get the idea.
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.
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
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?