Slashdot Mirror
Looking For E-Ink Applications Beyond Ebook Readers
An anonymous reader writes "When MIT's Media Lab originally came up with E-Ink back in 1997, we doubt they expected the technology to be this widely popular. Today, we see E-Ink's applications take a step further than just E-book readers. From streaming videos onto your wardrobe to camouflaging tanks, various companies have been experimenting with the technology to discover its next big adoption."
Then you could send messages to people via your tattoo like "Screw off!"
I've seen exactly one use of e-ink in the wild: ebooks.
We were hearing about color versions, video-speed versions, and wrappable versions five years ago. What can I buy? A monochrome Kindle with refresh so slow it make a man want to buy you another refresh.
Car dashboards!
E-Ink was actually invented in the 1970's by Nick Sheridon at Xerox PARC. MIT Media Labs simply tried to recreate it (and later altered how it was originally done).
The expectations in the 1990s were much higher than today. The expectation was that ultimately electronic paper would replace printed newspapers. You'd only buy one book and download any content to that book -- similar to what people could to with a vanilla Kindle. The Kindle Fire doesn't even use E-Ink, but a standard IPS LCD display. But most people still buy paper books (the offline variant). And any other products using E-Ink are still vapor ware: lots of announcements, none available. No wall sized displays replacing the concrete behind them with tropical islands, no camouflaged tanks, no nothing. Since years.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Considering how massively hyped it was at the time. I am pretty sure that they would be surprised that it is not being used in even more ways than it is currently. I remember the inventors talking about how it was going to change the way everything was displayed. They suggested that magazines would be published in it and the ads would change depending on where you bought/read the magazine (they never quite explained how the information about the contents for the new ad would get into the magazine). This is not the same as changes on an e-reader. They imagined this for disposable magazines they you would throw away when you were done with them.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
What I really want is a large e-ink display with a foot switch, so I can stop dicking around with sheet music and frantic page turns.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
e-ink and 3D are both VERY good at inducing migraine headaches, in my experience. Researchers interested in finding a cure please take note.
...it is awkward to pronounce. The two phonemes require an aspired stop, and it doesn't roll off the tongue nicely, unless you say eeeeenk (like Ren Hoek) instead of the stuttering Eee-Eeenk.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The Kindle Fire doesn't even use E-Ink, but a standard IPS LCD display.
Well, duh. If you want a dedicated e-reader you buy an e-ink Kindle, if you want to watch videos, etc, then you have to use an LCD because e-ink response time is so slow.
I know that there have been phones created using e-ink as the primary display. Much more of just a phone type cell phone rather than a smart phone. There are also some e-ink watches which makes a lot of sense too. I can always hope flexible e-ink displays get better so that the foldable e-ink phone/reader comes out, like this: readius
If it can't be used to enhance my porn experience then it's totally useless.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Hey, I like the Kindle. It's dirt cheap. The display doesn't give me a headache. And it's small, light, and simple.
Yeah, I'm disappointed that we haven't seen more of the promises delivered on too. But there is no need to run down the Kindle. It delivers on exactly what it promises and does it cheaply and well.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The problem with that is that E-Ink relies on physical opaque particles that have different colors on each side and their orientation changes with an electromagnetic charge. So you wouldn't be able to look through the window.
If you are reading, maybe you can tolerate full second rendering delays. You arent going to use this for a video game in this form.
True. Still waiting for one of those picture-frames to show up in a shop, that has:
Above seems 'simple' enough, but haven't heard of / seen any examples yet...
I would LOVE to be able to use e-ink in our restaurant. We have a 20 pg beer menu as well as our food menu and changing them out for pricing or item changes is a real pita and quite a waste of labor. To be able to update 100+ menus with a wireless connection would be great! Although, the potential for hacking could result in some very interesting menu text.
To Taiwain and all of the production offshored. That is what made this happen.
Custom self rewriting card decks, for all those crazy card games, or jut to change the pretty pictures on the back.
CRTs had maxed out; projection TVs and plasmas cost a fortune. But the world moved on to other screen technologies for the 50-foot screens you see in billboards and sports stadiums.
Yeah, I'm waiting for that since reading William Gibson's Neuromancer as a kid. They could make gazillions with these things.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Why not replace paintings (at least black and white ones)?
e Ink table top for boardrooms.
e ink large format display for CAD drawings. E size paper please and able to roll it up.
e ink 32" and 42" displays for digital signage.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
For a while there I thought LCD screens would be "almost free" having migrated into $7 cellphones and disposable cameras. But not quite cheap enough to put screens on cereal boxes like in the Minority Report movie. Given "Moore's Law" possibly somethime this century.
E-ink displays could be quite useful, if the module could be made cheap enough, in certain sorts of logistical applications...
Since you only pay a power cost when you change them, and static display costs nothing, things like shelf price tags that last ages on tiny batteries should be quite doable. a desktop/laptop equivalent to the small LCD status displays that servers have(usually switching between hostname/uptime/fault conditions/etc.) would make life easier as well. Having to boot a machine in storage or in transit just to learn its hostname/IP/whatever is a pain in the ass. A teeny little microcontroller module that chats with the motherboard and recharges its ultracapacitor when up, and then is good for a few hundred or thousand cycles through hostname/last IP/MAC/user defined barcode/Asset tag certainly would be handy...
Most people buy real books over ebooks because real books (paperbacks) are still cheaper (less expensive) at Costco (or other place) than the same ebooks are at B&N or Amazon. Hell, even some books are cheaper at B&N brick store than an ebook from B&N online.
Then you can resell (or trade) those real books in for credit at local used books stores, making the value even greater.
My mom has a Nook, and never has used it for this reason alone.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
One of the problems the eInk people had was that they completely constrained the market via hideously expensive development kits and a poor selection of screens. Only 1-2, low-resolution, nowhere-near-A4-or-US-Letter screens have been available. The only exception are 2-3 large-format readers like the Kindle DX and the Iliad Digital Reader 1000 (which was a miserable failure, in part because they lied through their teeth about the specs, especially battery life, which was miserable...a few hours at best, instead of "days" to "weeks"), but even those haven't come close to the size of a sheet of US Letter paper. PDFs are *barely* readable on them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_e-book_readers Look down that list of screen specs and you'll realize why e-Readers, aside from Kindles and Nooks, have been a failure.
Please help metamoderate.
That's how the old tech worked, but they have new ways. There are capsules of dark and light ink (which have opposite charges) suspended in a fluid. Depending on the input signal to the pixel, the dark or light ink can be floated to the top, to set the pixel. There is electrowetting as well. Wikipedia has a decent article on it.
A good e-ink calendar would be the killer app for me. It would be wesome if I could programmatically enter events and on the fly switch between Month/Week/Agenda type views. I could do this with an iPad I guess, but I would prefer a dedicated large picture frame type device that I can hang above my desk with low power consumption.
My UID is prime... is yours?
Plus paper books last (nearly) forever, you can give them them to kids or, if everything else fails, the nazis/communists/whatev0r can burn them.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
I realize slashdot's editorial standards aren't very high, and have been declining of late.
However, I really think even a 4th grade child could understand what's wrong with this sentence in the summary:
"When MIT's Media Lab originally came up with E-Ink back in 1997, doubt they expected the technology to be this widely popular."
Seriously? Basic reading should just tell you to fix this sentence so that it at least makes sense. Right now, is it "they expected the tech to be this widely popular", or is it "there were doubts they expected..." or even "they doubted the technology would be this widely popular."
Editors, it's not that hard. The fact this slips by you indicates you don't read the summaries, or even the title and summary. Not bothering to fix basic mistakes like that is one of the leading causes for the decline of Western Civilization.
with random plate number generator. Of course, with a button near the driver for quickly displaying back the legit plate number in case of emergency. E-ink seems to be sensitive to static electricity / external parasitic voltage fields though.
I was thinking that maybe an eink screen could be used for proofing graphics and photos before printing. I'm guessing the reflective screen would look closer to what it would on paper than what it would look on an LCD screen.
You could adjust the tint on your windows with a dimmer switch to let more/less light in.
Twinstiq, game news
Put E-Ink in shingles:
1) Have them tun white in the summer and full sun. Have them turn black in winter or at night.
2) Get them green energy Obama credits
3) ?
4) Profit!
"But most people still buy paper books."
At Amazon they're not.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376836,00.asp
A solution looking for a problem.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Amazon claims that it sold more Kindle e-books then phsycial books in 2010. (They still don't release kindle sales.)
And yes, this is a limited sample
Simple, yes, but it'd be black-and-white (-and-grey). I don't think anyone would want to pay for a picture frame that can't display color.
I used to work for Gyricon, which made its own type of electronic paper (though it was a very different approach than what E-Ink does). We were also looking for the killer app, focusing on large-scale signage rather than hand-held devices. The lack of color e-paper technology is a huge hurdle. Full color LCD displays are available that are cheap enough and efficient enough for most applications. If color is available for nearly the same cost, no one is going to choose black-and-white. The one and only exception to this is, you guessed it, books.
While not as much a concern as lack of color, refresh rate is also a problem for e-paper. Last time I looked at a Kindle, it took about a second to refresh the display. That kind of kills the idea of video. And the whole display flashes while refreshing, which kills the idea of basic animation. Again, this isn't a problem with LCD.
Electronic paper in general is doomed to be nothing more than a minor niche technology until it overcomes these hurdles.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
LCD photo frames were a huge fad a few years ago, but they universally suck. I would love to have a thin, E-Ink photo frame that would last for years on a single battery charge. I don't mind that it would be black and white - many portraits look great in B&W, and the paper-quality resolution would more than make up for it.
I convert guitar tab to PDF using tuxguitar output to lilypond, and it looks great. Usually I start with stuff I found online, and fix it as I learn the song.
I can't think of a better, easier way to put piles of music in a single place. Between things like Mutopia and the PDF export of most music programs, any musician would be silly not to get one.
Warning: Dont rely on one during an audition - I've seen more than 1 piano player not able to reach the 'next page' button in time!
But I generally agree, e-ink is useful for portable books and the updating newspapers we were promised when it came out. I see no advantage because LED is more suitable in just about every other case.
Considering how massively hyped it was at the time. I am pretty sure that they would be surprised that it is not being used in even more ways than it is currently. I remember the inventors talking about how it was going to change the way everything was displayed. They suggested that magazines would be published in it and the ads would change depending on where you bought/read the magazine (they never quite explained how the information about the contents for the new ad would get into the magazine). This is not the same as changes on an e-reader. They imagined this for disposable magazines they you would throw away when you were done with them.
Given enough time... it will be done, it's certainly possible allready, just not cheap. And that Sir, will change.
It's simple and of very little actual use, but I like the Lexar flash drives which have the E-Ink capacity meter on the side.
"Plus paper books last (nearly) forever"
nope. The last a long time, properly cared for.
It would take a completely collapse of all electronic and civilization for me to loose any eBook I own.
Books rot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Depends on the book, and frequently how old it is. If it was printed in the 1800s or early 1900s, it'll probably last a long time. If it was printed in the 1500s or so, it'll probably last even longer (because they used parchment, not paper). If it was printed in the second half of the 20th century, it's probably already disintegrating. Newer books printed on acid-free paper, however, should be pretty good.
Both need caring: books may rot, but the dead see scrolls are a pretty good example for how long paper may last. Then, for digital documents there is a thing called bit rot. Ever tried to read a floppy disk from 1990? Even if you got the drive, the medium of the floppy may have become unreadable. Or there is no program to open that document format. To avoid bit rot you can expect that you'll have to constantly copy and reformat your books. Bt
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
electronic paper is perhaps perfect to cover the niche of... paper! (at least the kind you use for printing...)
bickerdyke
One of the last things i did with my C1541 was copying over all my floppies to d64 files, so I still can run my first programming experiments.
Last year I finished my biggest project that started over 20 years ago.... I ported the fragments over to Inform7, and beeing able to read the original datafiles was a big help.
But don't be fooled by the red sea scrolls... parchment or papyrus is in no way comparable to actual paper. Paper too was quite durable until around 1810, when they started to use acid (pottassium alum). It was easier and cheaper to produce, better for writing and printing, but crumbled to dust not even 150 years later. (the sound you hear is the red sea scrolls breaking out in laughter)
Producing durable paper is a rather recent re-invention.
bickerdyke
Sure its only black and white but if I can program my own designs and patterns into it that'd be awesome.
Plus paper books last (nearly) forever, you can give them them to kids or, if everything else fails, the nazis/communists/whatev0r can burn them.
Plus paper books take space, have fixed-size small fonts, accumulate dust, won't give me an immediate dictionary look-up, and are a royal-pain-in-the-back when you carry box loads of them when moving to a new house. Oh, 10 paper books also take too much space in my luggage when I take them during my vacations.
[...]
While one's mileage may vary, I haven't yet met a single person that reads a lot that didn't marvel at the possibilities that the e-readers offer.
I'm still waiting for decent kindle apps!
Is there a reason why Amazon doesn't allow an Inform interpreter? That would be the perfect device for IF! (Or the other way round: finally interactive fiction found its medium)
bickerdyke
Actually, in 2-up form (built into the stand?), e-Ink would be a flawless solution for sheet music. If the sheets for an entire orchestra were laid out so the page breaks occurred at exactly the same place for everyone, the flipping could be automated by an offstage assistant so that page 1 would automatically become page 3 a few seconds after page 2 became the current page (and so on). Make them waterproof and bolted on to lyres, and you have the perfect solution for marching bands. Short of star trek-style visors with built-in heads up displays (which, admittedly, for a marching band could look pretty cool if designed as part of the uniforms), that's another market that's always had lame semi-solutions to limp around with, but never really had a truly GOOD solution to the problem of carrying around music in a way that's portable, but unobtrusive.
Offload the electronics into a separate device (so you'd plug in, update, and "reflash" the next sheet of e-Ink), and you've got awesome, relatively cheap high-end menus for restaurants that can be changed daily. Put the electronics back, and you can casually rewrite the menu between breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Make a long sheet of e-Ink, and you've got the perfect solution for apartment buildings and condos with residents who move in and out frequently.
Whomever can come up with a way to buy e-Ink on rolls, cut it with scissors (or at least a reasonable paper cutter), snap on an IDC-like interface to connect it to the (re)writer, and mount it in some kind of frame for safekeeping (ranging anywhere from simple plastic to gold) will totally deserve the patent rights (assuming he can actually make it WORK, and not just pull off a bullshit patent that says it does something without actually being economically viable so someone else can troll it for 18 years later on).
Ya know what would really be cool? an O'Reilly/Manning-sized book with 200-300 sheets of double-sided e-ink that has a color LCD touchscreen on a convertible laptop-tablet style pivoting hinge. Running some open-source environment, so you can tweak it to your liking. Then you could enjoy the search capabilities of an Android e-reader, the tactile look and feel of a real book (plus the ability to grab bunch of pages and physically flip to page 80 in a half second instead of screwing around with navigation menus), and a place to display color images and video.
A supplier might benefit from:
1. More active and/or targeted advertising so they can command a better price for ad space.
2. Distribution costs (possibly). If they can send out blank magazines and populate them as needed, it might be cheaper than paper.
Either of which might lower the cost to the consumer, which is the only advantage I see for consumers. (Of course, then there's the whole disposal problem - send them back to the store/distributor?)
Otherwise what's the point of e-ink if you're just using it as disposable paper?
Don't get me wrong, I can think of lots of cool uses (blowing up thumbnails, for instance) but they're mostly gimmicky and "cool factor" doesn't last long on its own.
So, it's possible, but I don't think the economics will ever be there even at significant scale. It has to not only beat online distribution to e-readers, but also paper!
I'd love to see an electronic version of a dry erase board. It'd be useful in areas subject to direct sunlight.
Unless there're some major medical advances and I live for an extremely long time, or I just throw my books in puddles of water whenever I can, I will rot before my books do. Durability of the medium is an important topic of discussion for preserving knowledge and information for society across generations, but not so much for a single persons lifetime.
Folks look at the way invention works. Someone creates something. Someone else screws with it and discovers and interesting property. Someone else has a problem, starts hunting for a technology that might solve his problem and POOF!!! a new use emerges. Look at all the things that have mushroomed into complete industries, hell, armies of industries. The laser. What the hell could coherent light be used for? It was a physics experiment. It's probably also the defining technology of the 20th century, responsible for more breakthroughs and more new industries than anything else we've discovered. There are now over a hundred thousand distinct uses for lasers, from cutting corneas to pissing off Police Helicopters. Teflon was an experiment gone wrong, same with the adhesive used in post-it notes. From the first experiments in carbon polymers we now have materials that beggar the imagination.
There are a thousand uses for e-paper that nobody has even dreamed of yet. The mood shirt. Chop sticks with advertisements (thanks Neal Stephenson, now someone's gonna screw up my meals at Panda Garden), Buses with News Crawls, Morphing Wallpaper, Plaid Cars, Polka Dot Sky Scrapers... if you can imagine it, you can make it. Wallpapering your life the way you wallpaper you MP3 app is now physically possible.
Imagine E-Paint, a suspension of components that applies as an emulsion, then separate into layers as it dries. There's your E-Ink for the body. The bottom layer is a conductive array, that senses nerves, and extracts sugars and electrolytes from perspiration to generate electricity to function. Another layer has a simple neural net capable of remembering several images. The top layer contains the display. Use an electrostatic device attached to a computer is used to set an image then store it in the E-Ink. Teach your E-Tattoo to react to your local nerve activity (or vice-versa) so you can switch tattoos at will. Have one of the images be blank so you can choose no ink. The perfect body art.
If you can imagine it, you can create it.
I would like a plain old monitor with e-ink, that I could hook up to my computer like any other. I am aware of the limitations but it would be great for certain applications.
Brett
I was thinking it would be good as an indicator of whether a device is on or off, instead of a red light to indicate "standby" mode,
The main issue with conventional displays is readability in sunlight. Few displays are actually capable of that. Those that are are expensive both $$$ and powerwise. Something that may not be available on every aircraft. This transponder for GA uses an e-ink display (i think) http://trig-avionics.com/tt22.html I'm surprised that its not used more. I guess the slow update speed is an issue, and Graphical LCD displays are moslty enough for the other applications in the cockpit. What i'd like to see more is electronic flight bags with E-ink.
The tags show low prices when on the shelf, but when brought near the register they increase. You use the same technology on the shelf price labels so if someone comes running back with an increased item to check, they show the high price.
There's probably no demand for eink picture frames. The main advantage of eInk is the lack of eye strain for most people. But you don't look at a picture frame long or intently enough for that to matter, so there really is no point. And most picture frames would likely be close to a power source, so battery would not be a major issue.
Most eink readers display pictures as "screensavers" fine, so it's not a matter of vapor ware but one of no one wanting the product.
It did not take 1 second for a page refresh. If it did, it might have been doing something else.
Marketers will market and pontificators will pontificate. Plenty of tech gets pumped, big whoop. Wanna fight about it?
All I want are inexpensive e-ink displays. There are a lot of things I would like to do, but the ones I've found so far are small and expensive.
Last time I looked at a Kindle, it took about a second to refresh the display. That kind of kills the idea of video. And the whole display flashes while refreshing, which kills the idea of basic animation. Again, this isn't a problem with LCD.
Not sure what these guys are doing that Kindle isn't, but low-motion video does seem possible. Looks like it's around 15-18 frames per second:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/16/bookeen-shows-off-fmv-on-a-standard-e-ink-pearl-display-video/
And that's on a standard pearl e-ink display.
A pict
A picture frame would be ideal as the current ones spend most of their energy back lighting a static image
The thing is, the display method is known now, but if you want to export something to an eink display, is it true to say that whatever you are using to export to it is not standard, so usually you have to include a small computer.
Still no eink display on a mobile phone yet.... what does that say about it? (I'd like to fit a eink screen to a phone...)
A blog I run for the wealth
Just waiting for someone to use e-ink to create the first working Rorschach mask.
Information Radiators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28development%29#Burn_down
This is what I would like to see.
Take a Kindle 3G. Increase the case size a bit, so that a landscape-oriented screen can fit. I recently read that the native resolution of the 6" screens is MUCH higher. Increase the pixel count to get 300dpi.
Add a touch screen.
Upgrade the CPU to Cortex A8-class. Improve hardware integration of the display controller to take better advantage of its native capabilities.
Upgrade the keyboard to a more traditional feel with a good layout (yes, this requires a bit of increased case thickness).
Include world-class RF connectivity and sensitivity.
Make it cheap and rugged (using plastic substrate instead of glass for the displays).
Integrate a decent sidelight or reading light of some sort (or backlight if possible).
Add other minor things.
Give it a completely open, hackable environment.
And you've got a TRS-80 Model 100 for the 2010s. Usable anyway. Interfaces with lots of hardware. Rugged. Hackable. Repairable.
I've been thinking of this same issue for a while. Ereaders are such a limited, narrow niche.