First Touch-Screen, Bendable E-Paper Developed

Al writes "The first touch-screen flexible e-paper has been developed by a team from Arizona State University and E-Ink (the company that makes the technology for Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader). Jann Kaminski and colleagues at ASU's Flexible Display Center say the main challenge is that most touch-screen technologies do not respond well to being flexed. So they used an inductive screen, which relies on a magnetized styluses to induce a field in a sensing layer at the back of the display. The first adopters for the technology are likely to be the US Army. Watch a video of the device being tested."

Comments

Re:Sounds cool

[mikael]

If they can extend it to the size of A4 and A1 sheets of paper, that could replace the need for printing glossy posters for poster presentations sessions at conferences and in office corridors. These are relatively costly to print, and become out of date (E-mail addresses tend to change).

Taking an A1 sized poster to a conference usually requires taking a rocket launcher sized tube through airports and train stations, along with the laptop containing a powerpoint presentation.

Imagine if all that was required was to take a USB memory stick and download an image to a generic E-ink display at the conference.

Return of the scroll

[miletus]

In the ancient world, books were scrolls, which avoided the complexity and expense of bookbinding. With flexible e-paper, I suspect the scroll will return to its rightful place as the preferred format for printed matter, since you'll only need one large scroll to display anything every printed.