E-Paper On Cereal Boxes

coastin writes "Wired Mag has an article about electronics maker Siemens, readying a paper-thin electronic-display technology. They say it is so cheap it could replace conventional labels on disposable packaging. Imagine items on grocer's shelves that flash commercials at you as you walk by. From the article: 'When kids see flashing pictures on cereal boxes we don't expect them to just ask for the product, but to say, "I want it", said Axel Gerlt, an engineer at Siemens tasked with helping packaging companies implement the technology.'"

Comments

Can you think of a better way

[Anonymous Coward]

to alienate parents?

Epilepsy?

[slavemowgli]

Flashing stuff on boxes all over the supermarket? That's got to be a nightmare for those suffering from epilepsy.

Re:Epilepsy?

[dr_dank]

Flashing stuff on boxes all over the supermarket? That's got to be a nightmare for those suffering from epilepsy.

In this age of data mining, persons afflicted with a seizure at the supermarket will quickly receive a coupon for a free shake from Baskin Robbins.

How utterly depressing

[Toby The Economist]

> From the article: 'When kids see flashing pictures on cereal boxes we don't
> expect them to just ask for the product, but to say, "I want it", said Axel
> Gerlt, an engineer at Siemens tasked with helping packaging companies implement
> the technology.'

Western culture appears to have lost its vision.

New technology being thought of in terms of how much you can make a child coerce its parent into buying cereal?

We're amusing ourselves to death.

Re:How utterly depressing

[guitaristx]

This could be a good thing if it gets parents more used to saying "Mo!" to their kids.

Is that anything like saying "Ni!" to old women?

Re:How utterly depressing

[LithiumX]

Vision?

Haven't a great many of the popular advances in the 19th and 20th century been driven by marketing, and the desire to draw attention for purposes of profit? The earliest visions of the phograph's uses were more oriented towards automated marketing than towards the memoranda and music they were actually used for. Color printing was exclusively for the purpose of making product packaging more appealing, and television only became possible as a mass-market item when it was married to marketing (to this day, commercials are the life blood of the networks).

Early radio broadcasts were practically commerials with a thin veil of entertainment laid over them. It took a little while for radio commercials to seperate from the actual content (when they started announcing the products during frequent breaks, rather than the programs constantly hawking a product within a poorly contrived story).

Holograms were invented simply to see it done, but the bulk of the funding came from companies who sought to apply them as the new wonder-label (which turned out to remain prohibitively expensive for some time, and just never that appealing).

Western technology has been driven by three primary needs:
* direct threats - be it war, disease, famine, etc. Death avoidance.
* misguided ambition - attempting to create something unrealistic, and ending up with something unexpected (and often unnoticed for some time)
* commerce - the inherent desire to make people give you money

Altruism is a noble thing, but it's greed that makes the world actually turn.

Re:How utterly depressing

[SquadBoy]

All three of mine soon learned that whining was the best way *not* to get something. This remains one of the things their mother and I agree on.

Yes it takes *seriious* time and effort to do this but it is well worth it.

Re:How utterly depressing

[LithiumX]

If you want to bring in a number of auxilliary driving forces, you might as well enumerate the seven deadly sins. When you think about it, these provide almost all the core reasons why we have advanced as fast as we have, compared to other cultures throughout history.

Many cultures have risen to heights, both technological and philosophical, some of which we ourselves can't yet lay claim to. But from a historical standpoint, Eurocentric societies have rapidly moved from being quite literally the armpit of the known world, to the absolute domination of the globe (both the US and modern Russia count as eurocentrically derrived, in the long run). Only China and the middle east can claim to have had a global impact worth comparing.

Why? Simple. Europeans, back in the dark ages, identified, enumerated, and understood human nature. They knew their sins, which made them easier to pursue.

Greed - the need to make money, and to find more ways of getting as much of it as possible.

Sloth - just plain lazyness. We want our machines to do the work for us.

Gluttony - the drive to produce more plentiful food, that tastes better, regardless of nutritional content or actual need.

Wrath - newer and better ways to kill our fellow man

Envy - one nation sees what another has, and wants it for themselves, so they have to figure it out for themselves.

Pride - the need to produce something better than what's out there, to become famous for your creations, or for national pride.

Lust - I'm not sure how to articulate why this actually drives western progress, but I'm certain it's the keystone to all our social evolution.

Re:How utterly depressing

[jafuser]

Altruism is a noble thing, but it's greed that makes the world actually turn.

Actually, it's conservation of angular momentum.

Re:The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

[middlemen]

I envision the day when porn will be flashed on the cereal boxes and the kid's Dad goes "I want it!"

Harry Potter

[Deinhard]

Are we getting close to the moving photographs in the Harry Potter movies?

Seeing Nick Nolte's mug shot scowling out at me from a post office wall would be most disconcerting.

Then again, a moving poster of [insert favorite model here] would be most intriguing.

Grocery store?

[michaelmalak]

Forget the grocery store (especially these days with groceries ordered over the Interent). Why, with e-paper, I'd want my cereal box to be web enabled, because it would be a whole lot better than reading the cereal ingredients over and over again over breakfast.

Boy, did the prognisticators really miss that one -- everyone kept talking about web-enabled microwaves. Little did they know the web-enabled cereal box would come first.

Yeah, right

[GigsVT]

I work for a retail label printer.

Average prices for labels run about $3-$10 per thousand. The most expensive labels on metallic stock with lots of spot colors might be $30 per thousand.

That's still 3 cents per label for the most expensive ones. I doubt they could even sort out the power supply for these things that cheaply.

Re:Yeah, right

[orasio]

I work for a retail label printer.

I feel your pain, brother. I work for a retail color laser printer. Printers are the worst bosses. This one pays me cash, the bank once said something about yellow dots in my money, and refused to accept a deposit.

Just what the environment needs

[Rhys]

Something less recyclable than paper to package all our crap with. That's flashy and annoying. And uses (and landfills) batteries.

On the bright side you'll always know if the product is fresh or not. Not fresh: no display. Of course then you won't know till you open it if you have Cheerios or Chex Mix.

It's much worse than that...

[hackwrench]

New technology being though in terms of not how to inform consumers but how to bypass the most informed and target the least informed, depending on them to persuade the better informed. Note: the child frequently doesn't actually want the cereal itself in this particular situation, but just the pretty box.

I can't tell you how many boxes of Frosted Flakes I ate for the primary goal of getting the Disney Afternoon figurine inside. There were also numerous times I thought I wanted something, but didn't actually know what it was.

Re:It's much worse than that...

[lrucker]

That's nothing new. When I was in high school I had a job for 1 day as an annoying mall survey person - not the one who accosts you in the mall, but the one who asks the questions once you've been captured.

Had to ask a woman (mid 20's, high school drop out, and quite frankly couldn't even approach pretty without plastic surgery) if, after looking at an ad, she thought some shampoo that cost more than she made in an hour would make her "beautiful". Was totally shocked when she said yes, and decided I couldn't do a job where the point was to find people's misconceptions and exploit them.

First things first

[mean pun]

Before we get all the useless and annoying applications of e-paper, could we please get something useful first: a comfortable e-book reader?

Pretty please?

Oh, and make it uncrippled. Yes, I'm looking at you, Sony.

Re:First things first

[Castar]

Exciting developments on that front, actually!

Two e-ink based readers are supposed to be released soon: The Hanlin V8/V2 and a device from iRex. The iRex reader is supposed to support Linux and be released in "early 2006" in Europe. The Hanlin V8 with a proprietary OS is supposed to be released "by the end of this year" in China for around $300, with the Linux-based V2 being released in May worldwide at about $320.

My money is on iRex, since they're backed by Philips and have a larger screen, but they might be more expensive than the Hanlin device. We'll see!

I can see it now...

[Dan Morenus]

A disgruntled cereal packaging company employee quits, and a few weeks later at 5:00pm some fine Sunday all the boxes on the supermarket shelf simultaneously and inexplicably start flashing goatse...

Curse or Blessing?

[BeBoxer]

Part of me thinks e-paper is going to be really cool and will allow us to make some neat gadgets. But at the same time, I'm terrified of what the marketing folks are going to do with it. We are already at a point where advertising pervades our environment everywhere we go. When it all starts flashing and jumping and pointing and demanding our attention at all times I think I'm going to go totally insane. I really think I might just snap and actually go crazy. And I suspect I'm not alone.

Re:The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

[AKAImBatman]

There still has to be a digital input to the ePaper. Like an LCD, it will always be possible to hack it to display something else.

You mean, in the same way it's possible to "hack" the FPU out of a CPU into another unit? THINK about it. If they print all the circuitry as a single device, you'd have to have fab-quality tools to directly interface with the ePaper. That is NOT my idea of a "hackable" piece of ePaper. (Especially since it would be cheaper and easier just to purchase a generic ePaper display.) And that's assuming that they don't further cut corners with tricks like not adding eInk to areas that don't change in the animation.

Medicine vials?

[mypalmike]

Miniature displays in color could appear on consumer-goods packaging, including medicine vials, in 2007, with a resolution of 80 dpi, Gerlt said.

"You say the defendant, Local Pharmacy Inc., failed to warn your late husband about possible side effects of the drug?"

"Yes, sir."

"Show me the bottle. Let's see here. 'Not to be taken with alcohol. May cause dizziness, blindness, and death.' Clearly, if he had read the bottle, he would have known about the 'death' side-effect."

"Sure, but the label didn't say 'death' until just an hour ago. It said 'headaches'."

Re:It's coming

[Gabe Garza]

> Soon we'll have advertising on every inanimate surface.

Why would we limit ourselves to inanimate surfaces? I envision a day when I go to a seafood restaurant and the oysters have a self-updating "I've been out of water DD HH.MI.SS" display attached to their shells; the lobsters have a "My claws currently weight WW ounces each, and I was harvested only HH hours ago" display on their carapaces; and the waiters have dazzling, dynamic pieces of flair attached to their uniforms that vibrantly inform me how much they love their job.

And that is how western civilization crumbled...

[The Famous Druid]

... in the Supermarket Riots of 2008.

Pathetic parents?

[Nutria]

When kids see flashing pictures on cereal boxes we don't expect them to just ask for the product, but to say, "I want it"

And I expect good parents to whack them upside the head until they say please.

And then whack them upside the head until they politely shut up after the parent says "No".

If Google has taught us anything...

[Trip Ericson]

...it's that in a world where all the advertisements are flashly, the plain one stands out.