| "Flexible as paper, versatile as a computer screen, new material blurs
lines between the digital and paper worlds"
-- Xerox web site
Electronic paper or electronic ink is possibly the next new display
technology, and is being worked on by Xerox, 3M, MIT, and
possibly others.
If this technology works, it very well may replace the LCD displays in
laptops and PDA's, and may even cause a small revolution
in portable computing, and we may get a completely different device.
Electronic ink probably needs to be combined with flexible transistors
or plastic transistors (being worked on by Bell Labs), or perhaps
replaced by transparent transistors (by Tokyo Institute of
Technology), or organic transistors (IBM, Bell Labs, Cambridge, Penn State, others).
Of course, I'm just speculating on possible applications based on
today's existing products. Technologies this revolutionary will
probably create possibilities for whole new products that couldn't
even be imagined by looking at what we have now, and in areas beyond
just the computer industry. For example, Xerox wants
to actually replace paper with electronic paper and magnetic pencils.
I can think of several other interesting applications, how about you?
How far are we now from Nell's book in the Diamond Age?
Stay tuned as this technology develops...
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