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Electronic paper moving off the drawing board 84

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-tech dept.
rafa writes "Electronic paper is finally moving from concept to manufacturing. Xerox has made a deal with 3M to eventually manufacture it. " They're expecting about a year of figuring out the best process and such, but look for it in on the market early next year. Excellent.
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Electronic paper moving off the drawing board More

Electronic paper moving off the drawing board

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  • Grand! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Can electronic toilet paper be far behind?
  • While this is certainly a while off - I can just imagine that PDA's cold become a lot more useful. Imagine folding out the screen on your pda to A4 size. Slashdot on a page - with updates. A constant source of news. Being able to take notes in the margin of online manuals while commuting.

    Rikard
  • Posted by The Devout Capitalist:

    This article may signify a break into new technology. Years of novels and concept articles discuss the economics of new news service, payment tracking, and other ventures waiting just shy of a business plan. When the units start to ship in sample quantities, another threashold will pass.

    Silicon Valley depends on passing these marks to create new high mark-up products, and the old WIMP (Windows Interface Mouse Pointer) PC is running out of margin. What other technoligies are about to hit?
  • Posted by Ungrounded Lightning Rod:

    So the toner particles have a charge and are
    rotated by an electric field, to show the white
    or the black side.

    Imagine using this above the 48th parallel
    in winter - when in an unhumidifed room
    you can draw a quarter-inch arc from your
    finger to any handy piece of metal after
    walking across a rug or standing up from
    an upholstered chair.

    The black (or white) lines twisting
    across the page from the point where you
    picked it up should be quite pretty.
  • Posted by Ungrounded Lightning Rod:

    So the toner particles have a charge and are
    rotated by an electric field, to show the white
    or the black side.

    Imagine using this above the 48th parallel in
    winter - when in an unhumidifed room you can
    draw a quarter-inch arc from your finger to
    any handy piece of metal after walking across
    a rug or standing up from an upholstered chair.

    The black (or white) lines twisting across the
    page from the point where you picked it up
    should be quite pretty.
  • It'd give a whole new meaning to flushing your output buffers. :}

    ---

  • Not the same stuff (Score:5)

    by tgd ( 2822 ) on Tuesday June 29, 1999 @10:28AM (#1826420)
    This "electronic paper" is not the same stuff as the "digital ink" and "e-ink" that has been talked about for a few years. This is a non-interactive technology, and has nothing really to do with computers per se.

    Its basically rewritable paper. You can "print" an image onto it with a machine like a printer that can change the orientation of the ink "bubbles". The idea behind it is feeding it like normal paper through the "electronic paper printer". Then if you want to erase it or write over it, just send it through the printer again.

    Personally I don't see the use for it. Paper is cheap, you can't accidently wipe it out, and its awfully hard for someone to change what's on it. I'd be worried about someone noterizing something printed on the stuff and having someone else able to change it after that point.

    I think the electronic ink systems that are being worked on by a couple of companies in the Boston area (and I'm sure others) that use an electronic ink on a bit-addressable paper-like surface to be able to dynamically alter the content of the page like in an electronic book is far more useful, if not at the very least for power consumtion. (ie, once the image on the page is changed to the next page, you don't need any more power to keep it there)

    I'm sure the PARC development can be used that way too, but from other things I've read on it, that's not Xerox's intent with it or 3M's.
  • From the article: "Currently we are working on manufacturing and volume," said Bob Sprague, manager of Xerox PARC's Document Hardware Lab. "It won't be on the market in the next year."

    From Hemos's post: "They're expecting about a year of figuring out the best process and such, but look for it in on the market early next year. Excellent."

    Not only does that conflict with the article (the article makes me think it won't be on the market for June 99 - June 2000 for sure and probably much later) but Hemos's statement that "it will be on the markey early next year" (which makes me think January 2000) conflicts with his estimate of "they're expecting about a year to figure out..." which makes me think it'll be out June 2000 or soon thereafter.

    Also, I noticed quite a few posts claiming this technology was stolen - in the article it discusses the technology developed ten years ago at Xerox this is based on.

  • <joke>What I heard was that they sold a bunch, but then went out of business when nobody needed more for another 20 years...</joke>
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
  • > Maybe we should organize a field trip to go
    > through their "that will never work" idea room.
    > I'm sure we could find a use for some of the
    > stuff in there.

    Hey, it worked for Steve Jobs.

    *grins*


    ---
  • Online, yet traditional, newspapers of any kind would be nice though. It'd completely revolutionise the newspaper industry, although people would be less inclined to leave their newspapers about.

    BTW, love that sig - just compiled it.
  • They were working on this 5-10 years ago, but decided it wasn't worth pursuing so they killed the project. Something (maybe the hype from the other 'digital paper') changed their mind, and they ressurected it. So while they could have been years ahead of their potential competitors, now they're two years behind. Way to go, Xerox!

    This isn't the first time Xerox had the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread(tm) sitting in their labs and decided it wasn't worth anything. They must have a higher quotient of PHB's than normal.
  • If a notary will attest to something on this stuff, they'd likely do Etch-A-Sketch notarization too. Maybe notarize notebook displays.
  • It's probably Y2K compliant, but I'm sure the real question on everyone's minds here is DOES IT RUN LINUX? :-)

    Cheers,
    Vic
  • Cute idea.

    Big catch is, as it's magnetic based, it uses iron as an "toner" stlye media. The downside of that is it'd be only black and white for a while, and 220 dpi isn't really that great (and won't get you nicely varied greys either).

    Still, I'm going to mentally file this under "If we can dream it, we can build it" and dig it out in a few years time.

    I really like the idea of having ~zero thickness addressable media. Throw away your CRT (or even LCD) based monitor. Now your PC talks to the walls. Moving house would be a bit annoying though. (I have to paint/paper the wall before I can get the computer working again. No email for weeks (months, given me organisational skills) Playing Need For Speed/Quake etc on the bedroom wall seems like a worthwhile goal.....

  • well, I'm sure one could use a special "pen" on it as well, becasue of how the balls are moved.

    Lea

    disclaimer: I work for Xerox-PARC (as an intern)
  • oh, the researchers understand what they have, and did back in the days of the Alto... it's just that Xerox headquarters didn't market it -- not that they can really be blamed... it takes a lot of vision to go for that stuff, especially then, and when it would have been so ridiculously expensive...

    researchers there do think about applications of their stuff to the real world, but they can also look beyond that to what comes next.

    Lea

    disclaimer: I work at Xerox-PARC (as an intern)
  • that was actually the first thing I thought when I saw it :)

    becasue of the nature of the technology, it can't ever be full color, but I think that a BW (or Red and Blue or somehting) display could be nice

    it's not instant, however, since it's a mechanical system... that could limit the refresh rate quite signifigantly

    Lea

    disclaimer: I work at Xerox-PARC (as an intern)
  • well, I signed an NDA, and I don't know much anyways. I personally am working on modular reconfigurable robotics, which is fun. there are a lot of awfully cool things here, and I'd be happy to buy them if they come to market :)

    Lea
  • I recently read a newspaper article about this, which stated that E Ink can currently do two-colour combinations.

    The mechanism was explained via analogy:
    Think of a clear beach ball filled with coloured liquid and ping-pong balls of some other colour.
    View this beach ball from above.
    When the ping pong balls are floating oat the top, the beach ball appears to be the colour of said ping pong balls.
    Toggle the density of the ping pong balls, making them sink to the bottom, and the colour of the beach ball appears to change.

    The creators of E Ink expect it to drastically reduce to use of paper....
    Somehow, I think that they're missing part of the point to hardcopy....
  • I want a piece of this stuff with wireless internet access that can display the latest /. stories on my newspaper!
  • (Just musing on it)

    This is one of the thoughts that comes to mind, of course. If electronic paper replaces paper, the paranoid in me asks, what stops the "1984" scenario of altering history by altering its recording?

    Mind you, this is a big if.

    However, I've recently been dealing with my ISP, whose service agreement is on the web. I had a dispute with them over the blocking of port 80 (mandatory web proxy use). In their agreement (on-line) as I accepted it, there was to be no port blocking. Of course, when I revisited the URL, this had, in fact, been changed.

    (Yes, I did have a printed hardcopy of this. But that's pretty much the point, isn't it?)

    (The proxy issue was easy enough to deal with. Squid and IPChains are a formidible combination)

    --

  • Having a PDA (especially running the or a variation on the Palm OS) would be incredibly cool. One major issue, as I have played with some early prototypes of this at the MIT Media Lab, is the refresh rate. Since it's not strictly an electrical means of drawing the screen (rotating the balls) it's not nearly as instantaneous as one might want for such a device. This kind of display works best for static content (dynamicly updatable newspaper). Actually, now that I think of it, the Palm OS remains quite static for many things (memopad scrolling would be an exception).

    Well, if such barriers were torn down, this would certainly be a wonderful use of electronic paper. Sitting on the train heading to work, unroll your Palm XX, download your palm's email and head over to Slashdot to get your daily fix. Mmm, I'm lovink this already.

  • Maybe we should organize a field trip to go through their "that will never work" idea room. I'm sure we could find a use for some of the stuff in there.
  • An article in New Scientist may elucidate! See:
    http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990515/papergoese .html

    It has quite a good definition on the subject and talks about the relationships between the main protagonists too!

  • You can find information about how PARC's epaper works and some of the applications envisioned for it on PARC's web site [xerox.com] on this page [xerox.com]. More traditional display applications are very much being considered, in addition to the ideas about novel, more paper-like uses.
  • The beads are "a little bit bigger than toner particles". What I wonder is-- is it just black and white, or do they do color? Can they be written with a mesh embedded in the paper (ala core memory), or does the paper need to be fed past a write head? (If so, what's the advantage over paper & ink?)
  • In Sci Am last year they were discussing this technology. The limit is flexible TFT hardware and how small it can be made. The proof-of-concept sheet that they were talking about was a sheet of vinyl with a faceplate from a dead notebook to handle the electricals. They had good results as to performance but poor contrast due to power constraints.
  • This thought is not original with me, but I don't recall the source. Xerox formed PARC with the idea that it would help them make money. They realized that directed reseach may produce incremental improvements but not breakthroughs, so they let researchers do what they wanted (within reason). Most of PARC's research was worthless to Xerox, as Xerox did not want to risk significant amounts of money in unproven markets. The laser printer that PARC developed, however, more than paid for the cost of PARC.
  • Oh, great, now not only will my office be littered with Post-It notes, but now when I do find the one I want, it will have changed on my anyway!
    Seriously though, from what I've seen, this stuff needs something like a magnetic plate to flip the pixels, so the concept of sticking it to a surface and pulling it off again isn't that far fetched. I imagine a device doctored to look like a hardcover book would work quite well. (I'd buy it.) I imagine to start with though they'll push printers for the stuff and the paper'll be like 20 lb stock. Oh well, baby steps.

    Still, 0 glare on my Palm Pilot in direct sunlight would be spiff. Even if it stayed the same size.
  • Closer and closer to what I would really like to have: a flat, paper-size web client, with wireless, high-speed internet access. (Running Linux, of course).

    Some combination of this "electronic paper" and a touch-screen could very easily replace some computers. It definitely wouldn't work for programming, but it would be really useful where 100 lbs. of paper copies are generally required.

  • > DOES IT RUN LINUX?

    Dude, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these things? I tried, but the sheer profoundness of it nearly destroyed my brain. It was like in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" when Hunter Thompson drinks the whole vial of liquified human pituitary gland. IT WAS THAT AMAZING.
  • about a year ago it was either popular mechanics or popular science that had an article on this subject, talked about 'digital ink', etc. if it was in popular mechanics, you could prob find it at their web site pmzone [pmzone.com]. If it was in pop sci, then your guess is as good as mine as to where to find it.
  • This sounds a bit shady.

    Does anyone remember last year when e-paper started in the media? The process we have already heard about, it was suposedly developed by a Kid at MIT, who now is involved with the E-Ink company, WHO ARE ALREADY SELLING IT! There was a slashdot article awhile back that linked to the publicity anouncement.

    So, the question is, is Xerox trying to steal the e-paper industry from E-Ink? If they have been working on this stuff, why didn't we hear from them when e-paper was last getting a big hype-push?

    I am suspicious, but thats just me.


    -Crutcher

  • Why it's useful (Score:4)

    by RebornData ( 25811 ) on Tuesday June 29, 1999 @01:41PM (#1826448)
    So what if it's not e-ink? E-ink isn't any better for notarized documents. The key here is that while some use of paper is permanent (records, legal documents, etc..) a LOT of it is transient.

    This is true in most business environments today. Most premanent records these days are stored electronically. It's stuff like agendas, faxed plane ticket confirmations, meeting presentations, etc... In my personal case, it's a lot of stuff I printed for use where my laptop is inconvenient (which is pretty often).

    I've seen people kill a whole ream of paper printing presentations for a small meeting where everyone just chucks them afterwards. Better to chuck them into a "reuse" bin. It's a way of getting to that "paperless" office without having to kick people from their paper addiction. Even with the reuse, it will probably be years before this stuff is justifiable on a purely financial basis, but it would save a lot of trees. I'm betting e-ink will always be too expensive for this sort of use.

    Another possible benefit is security. If I understand how these things are designed, it would be impossible to read them after they're erased, unlike most magnetic media which is really hard to completely wipe clean. Shredding paper is less than ideal... the strip-style shredders will protect against casual evesdropping, but not from someone who's determined (and patient).
  • Paper is cheep, but damn it means no more woodchip if 'paper' is recycled continously this way.
    The advent of the 'paperless' office has created soooo much paper that a way of easy re-use is a breath of fresh air for all that vegitation about to be chopped down.
  • I seem to remember it is about 220dpi ...
  • For a more detailed article, take a look at the september 1998 Scientific American in the "Technology in Business" section. They mention the resolution (which i seem to remember as 220dpi but don't quote me on that.
    I remeber reading about this when the article was in scientific american, and it's neat to see that they are actually going to try to produce this (i'm so sick of seeing cool geek technology shelved by companies). Hopefully they won't sell it with a restrictive OEM only contract, so i can actually get my hands on some (unlike the very small hard drives made by another technology giant who shall remain nameless)
    An unrelated question for you all: Remeber the flexible, plastic, non-metallic batteries that were mentioned in scientific american a while ago? The ones that were not being produced because they might be useful for terrorists or some other stupid brain-dead technophobe reason... Do you know if they ever came into existance?
  • My children refer to my PalmPilot as "Daddy's MagnaDoodle"!

    I think Tyco (I think) and 3Com are missing a bet here...
  • Janitors at PARC have just announced electronic toilet paper. The revelation of the new electronic TP has shocked the executive staff, on whom the janitorial staff experimented by stocking the executive washroom with prototype rolls of their new invention. A spokesperson for the group revealed that they have now begun working on a digital product that could be deeply embedded, and hope to be through the experimentation stage soon.
  • Sounds like someone needs to come up with an extension to digital signature technology for notarizing/verifying this type of document.
  • Dude, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these things?

    I think you're referring to the invention I just filed my patent for. I call it a Book(tm)

    (Grin)

  • Leah,

    So what is the PARC working on now?
  • It's amazing how Xerox PARC technology keeps trickling out there. What a different world this would be if they had understood what they had.

    And is it just me, or are you reminded of the "smart" paper in Diamond Age?
  • It's a little tablet that contains iron powder. A magnetic stylus pulls the powder thru a hex grid and it 'stains' the glass. A magnet strip erases the pictures by pulling the powder back under.

    Crude, but the essential design is the same--moving trapped particles of ink around.
    - - -

  • You're probably thinking of this article:
    http://www.popsci.com/news/12131998.e ink.html [popsci.com]

    It's about "E-Ink", a startup out of MIT that is making technology which sounds very similar to the XEROX stuff. For more articles and info about them, check out their website:

    http://www.eink.com [eink.com]

    Shawn
    stsamuel@post.harvard.edu
  • I think there will be a way to notarize this somehow: that is no reason to say that e paper will be useless!! There will always be forgers and criminals, whatever technology you make, but that should never be a reason to do away with new technologies.

    What e-paper *can* do on the other hand, is stop us from producing so many great amounts of newspapers every day, that are going to be obsolete that same afternoon. And magazines that aren't completely biodegradable because of their plastic content will also stop having to be made from our already poor resources. Maybe this new e-paper thing can make the whole world a little greener.

    I don't thing the cost should be such an issue. Paper is cheap because you can only use it once, but with epaper you can probably go on for months!

    One thing I'd like to know: is e-paper made from biodegradable components? What effect will it's mass introduction have on the ecology? Can it be recycled? I hope the people who are creating it are asking themselves those questions.

    Ale

  • Re:Dude (Score:1)

    by ine ( 43133 )
    Uh. A beowulf cluster of electronic paper? Ooook. I think someone needs to get outside for some fresh air.
  • Now if only they had some half decent handwriting recognition software it may be usefull... I don't know anyone who wants to use a computer to see handwriting.

    I can type FAR faster then I can write, maybe it's just me but other then the "wow thats neato!" factor I don't see much of a point to it.
  • Dare I say it... NANOTECH!!!
  • Wow!!! Etch-a-Sketch for the new millenium. Is it Y2K compliant?
  • This "electronic paper" sounds like a thin magna-doodle to me!
  • Diamond Age was the first thing I thought of when reading this article. Doubt it will be as cheap to make as it was there though.

  • That looks pretty darned nifty.

    Does anyone know anything about the portable computing implications? Like a really big, thin, flexible Palm Pilot? Now, _that_ would be sexy.

    -awc
  • It's funny how they come up with all these neat ideas (hypertext, object oriented programming, the WIMP model, the mouse...) but -- Xerox being the photocopier company -- the only one they bother to market is fancy paper...

    "If it's not paper, it's crap!"

    "Ok boss..."
  • Yeah, but *lots* of people write on paper, right? Don't necessarily think of it as a computer, think of it as a book, a library, a newspaper magazine sheaf of notes whatever.

    Think how cool it could be to have, say, the library of congress on a single sheet (and some kind of processor & memory of course). If you want to scribble all over the books, go right ahead. Someone wants to make different notes? Fine. It doesn't have to interfere with your commentary.

    This stuff doesn't have to "recognize" anything, (though it would be cool if it did of course). All it has to do is store and retrieve data -- text, notes, underlining, doodling, etc.

    Everything else is just frosting on a very interesting cake.

  • For that matter, I remember reading in high school about a new type of lightbulb that could burn for up to like 20 years (as opposed to ~1000 hours for a plain old incandescent bulb). It was based on some kind of radio transmitter (instead of a filament) that would illuminate the inside of a bulb. Does anyone out there remember &/or know anything about this? I've talked to others that remember this, it has to exist somewhere. Did G.E. or Sylvania buy out & suppress this idea or what?


  • Xerox PARC's project page has their press release and more info:

    http://www.parc.xerox.com/dhl/projects/epaper/

    There is a picture here of someone apparently writing on the e-paper with some kind of stylus. (You can see a wire running out of the back):

    http://www.parc.xerox.com/dhl/projects/epaper/im ages/matt2.jpg

    Implies that it can handle input & output.
  • The Taiwanese are the world's leader in handwriting recognition systems. It's a lot easier and faster inputing Chinese (or Japanese) by handwriting than by keyboard.
    An input device and software (Window compatible, of course) sells for about $35US in Taiwan.
  • Has anybody seen any indication of how many dots-per-inch this technology or other digital ink technologies are? I've never seen mention of this rather relevant fact.
  • It's similar to the electronic paper in Diamond Age, however all we're talking about here is a display. To be truly useful, you need to attach a "brain" to it.

    Which is why I thought that the book in Diamond Age was pretty slick. They were able to use the electronic paper for the display and embed the power supply and the actual computer in the binding. It ended up solving the problem of where the computer would go. Now I know that they also had sheets of electronic paper that had computers built into them, but we're not that far away from that either.

    Think about it.... take one of these gyricon displays, then layer a sheet of plastic behind it that has a printed circuit on it that is the computer. The silicon wafers for microchips are very thin and could be right on the plastic (as we see with some very thin devices now). Want it to have wireless net access? Just print a trasnsceiver onto that sheet. 8.5x11" makes a really nice antenna, even if it is paper thin. Now all you have to worry about is the power supply, and I don't think that that is really that difficult to work in. So we've got a piece of smart paper that's a little bit thicker than this electronic paper, and nearly as flexible.

    We can even go further with this. I think I remember reading not too long back about IBM developing microchips with a plastic base. If that wasn't just a memory glitch on my part, then we now have semiconductors that are thinner and more durable than silicon wafers. And who says we only have to have one sheet for the computer part of this? We're really not that far off from having smart paper that's performing the functions of a full size computer.

    Pretty neat stuff. It's a good time to be a geek :)

    ---
  • There is already a lot out there on the web about this subject. The
    electronic paper they're talking about (described, by the way, at
    comdex, http://daily.zdevents.com/comdex/fall98/thurs/ts2. html) is
    based on Xerox's 'Gyricon' electronic ink system, which they've been
    researching for quite a while now. There's an article about it in
    Wired (http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/160 28.html).
    There are descriptions of Gyricon on the web, including the 98
    Scientific American article
    (http://www.sciam.com/1998/0998issue/0998techbus 1.html ) and also a
    set of slides with illustrations for the talk 'Observations on Reading
    and Publishing in the Electronic Age'
    (http://www.gr.osf.org/i-commerce/) that describe Gyricon. Gyricon is
    not the technology (The Last Book -
    http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/363/jacob son.html) developed by
    the MIT Media lab. The Media lab technology was spun off into a
    private company, E Ink Corporation (http://www.eink.com/) that has all
    kinds of press releases describing what they've been up to lately.
    They seem to be mostly focusing on signage right now, and have even
    done some big public demos
    (http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story /19457.html) recently.
  • How much relation does this development have to E-Ink (the stuff that was made in MIT)? It sounds like almost the same product, but E-Ink, IIRC, is only an output medium. However, this "new" development from Xerox sounds like it is an input medium as well as output (see the last line concerning "wands" and printers). Are these the same product or not? Anybody know?

    FWIW, I think it only really makes sense as an output medium...not for input--pen tablets seem to be plenty good enough thus far (or just plain old-fashioned paper).

  • Goody, digital paper... Thats nice I suppose, but I think Digital Wallpaper would be MUCH better. You could easly but the hurts on paint and reagular wallpaper companies.... Now I can change the color of my room with just a click of a button... Put up any pattern I wanted... Those nice pictures of Pam Anderson. :P
    Have /. on my walls... That would truly rule....

    Digital Bilboards, yet another great idea..... Have differnet ads running all day and night.... Have news updates, etc....

    Ah the joys of it all...

    Now, they just have to make it REALLY cheep and really good quality/picture quality. :)

    I can dream can't I? :P
  • Does this mean I don't have to give up my
    trusty, well worn, dog-eared, mangled tab,
    scuffed up leather bound Day Runner now?
    Geeze I hope so, because if I can't convince
    myself to shell out the 3 bills for a palm
    I doubt I can convince the boss to either.
    (The 19" flat screen hard enough)

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