Credit: Technology Review

This is not your mom's snowboard. At the Society for Information Display this week, reflective-display company E Ink is exhibiting a number of prototypes that hint at future products. Definitely the most whimsical is a snowboard with a semi-circular black and white display showing a compass, clock, and weather predictions.

The idea is not to give grandparents nightmares about teens reading text messages while plowing down mountainsides, but to demonstrate future directions for the company's flexible, rugged, low-power displays. E Ink, which is owned by Taiwanese company Prime View International, makes the black-and-white displays found in e-readers such as the Kindle. Their displays are also found in some cell phones and niche products.

The low power requirements for these displays—once the image changes, it doesn't require any power to maintain it—and good readability under sunlight will, the company hopes, enable them to expand into a broader range of products. The company has started to get these displays in point-of-sale display ads in stores. Combined with static color images, the black-and-white E Ink backing flashing on and off makes an ad for detergent or athletic shoes appear animated.

Another fun was a music stand that would display the music instead of holding it up, with a foot pedal at the bottom to turn the page. In the latest generation of products, the displays now switch fast enough to write on the music, which you will need to do when the conductor yells at you to play louder in the sixth measure.

Credit: Technology Review

On the floor of the exhibit hall at the Society for Information Display conference in Seattle this week were many amazing technologies. One of the things that impressed me the most was E Ink's latest prototypes. The company still isn't providing full color, video capable displays, but the picture on their latest screens has a better color gamut and it's crisp and easy on the eyes. Other companies have leapfrogged E Ink with color, video-capable reflective displays, such as Qualcomm's Mirasol, but E Ink's electronic paper is getting better and better. (See the video below.)

E Ink pixels contain electrically charged black and white particles; the application of a small voltage moves one or the other color particle to the surface to make it reflect white light or appear black. Due to the reflective mechanism, these displays look good under strong light. And they sip from the battery because no power is required to maintain an image. To create a color display, E Ink applies a filter on top of a black and white screen. Earlier versions appeared washed out because too much light was lost on its journey into and out of the capsules and through the filter. But the next generation of color displays have a better color gamut. They're built with a higher-resolution black and white screen that contains new materials. Company representatives didn't go into detail, but said the new displays look better because the black material is blacker, the white material whiter.

A prototype e-reader they wouldn't let me get on film played a flash video advertisement from the New York Times website in black and white. They can't do video in color yet but the company expects to create screens that do by the end of the year. And E Ink is now using a compact power-management chip designed by Texas Instruments for E Ink displays that will save battery life without taking up too much space.

E Ink was acquired by Taiwanese company Prime View International (PVI) in December. One upshot of this partnership is that PVI is developing flexible plastic display backplanes that could be combined with E Ink for fully flexible screens. The company's electronic paper is flexible, but the transistor arrays its been paired with so far in products are not. In the exhibit booth, the company showed off fully flexible displays mounted on PVI's plastic backplanes. These might be used in future e-readers and other devices that are lighter and tougher and potentially flexible.

In a keynote speech this morning at the Society for Information Display's annual Display Week conference in Seattle, Steven Bathiche, the research director of Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group, demonstrated an immersive computing system that expand on the company's Surface technology. Surface is a tabletop display that uses a set of four cameras to detect the location of objects placed on its surface, and special software to identify objects. Even with fantastic software, this technology can only do so much.

During his talk, Bathiche played a video that shows what's possible when this concept is combined with better hardware--some nifty (but sketchily explained) optics and a transparent display. Transparent displays can do more than provide heads-up information while allowing you to see in front of you (for example showing traffic information on a windshield). A transparent display can look back at you. Bathiche's group has combined a flat lens called a wedge lens with a transparent light-emitting diode display. This system can act as a touch screen; it can also detect gestures made from several feet away.

In video of a demo system where the display is mounted on top of the flat lens, a man walks up to the display and then walks back several feet, while the display shows his image. That image is captured using the lens rather than an external camera. Using this form factor, each hand can be assigned a different function--the left hand draws while the right moves the "paper" on screen. Even when the hands cross, the system keeps track of which hand is which and what it does.

Another system Bathiche showed on video uses a camera and image-processing sofrware to determine two viewers' positions, and the positions of their eyes, and then processes that information to sequentially and directionally display different images to each viewer. Bathiche said this enables side-by-side, glasses-free 3-D viewing.