Electronic Ink Shows Its True Colors

E Ink and Xerox are among the companies hoping to change the way you use a pen and paper.

Meghan Holohan, Computerworld

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The sign will be made with electronic ink. It will be wirelessly connected through a two-way pager to the store's inventory database, allowing the sign to change its message according to stock demands.

As intriguing as this may sound, it's just the beginning of what Cambridge, Massachusetts-based E Ink hopes to accomplish. The company is a leader in the development of electronic ink and "paper" that could replace newspapers and books as we know them today.

Now That's Recycling

The use of electronic ink and two-way wireless communication could lead to the creation of electronic books that will renew themselves with new selections when readers are finished with the current book--or newspapers that update themselves with the latest news while being read.

Electronic ink, as devised by E Ink, is a clear liquid plastic in which there are microcapsules that contain white color chips in a blue dye. The microcapsules are suspended in a substance similar to vegetable cooking oil. The white chips are negatively charged so they react to electrical stimulus.

This ink can be spread on any surface--from walls to computer screens--says Russell Wilcox, vice president and general manager at E Ink. However, he says, the writing surface would look similar to a very thin laptop display screen with a clear surface on the front and circuitry on the back.

A positive charge applied on the top surface of the ink will allow the white to show, making the surface as white as a sheet of paper. If the charge moves to the bottom, the dark particles will show, giving the appearance of blue ink.

Electronic ink uses less power than a PalmPilot, Wilcox says, and the message remains displayed even after the power is turned off.

The ultimate goal is for the electronic pages to look and feel like paper. However, for the foreseeable future, these new books are likely to be bulkier than paperback books.

Wilcox says electronic ink will have interactive qualities, although E Ink isn't sure when people will be able to write with it. There should be demos for an electronic book with flexible pages within the next five years, Wilcox says.

The Xerox View

Xerox is also working on a technology that could replace paper as portable, renewable reading matter.

The Xerox technology is called Gyricon. It's composed of a silicon rubber compound with the thickness and flexibility of poster board. The Gyricon sheets contain thousands of plastic balls, black on one side and white on the other, suspended in oil. The balls act as pixels to display images that can be updated much the same way as with a monitor.

The beads are embedded in a large sheet, with each microcapsule suspended in oil to allow the beads to rotate in their orbits, says Robert Sprague, manager of the document hardware lab and electronic paper projects at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

Sprague says the paper could be powered by a matrix of transistors, such as those in laptop computer screens. Gyricon, like real paper, uses reflective light, so it would use less electricity.

A Gyricon book will eventually be connected with a wireless device that will enable a reader to download content from the Internet.

Xerox will also make the Gyricon interactive, so a user could write on it and reuse it.

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For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright © 2007 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved.

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