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Digital Ink On Billboards 272

Posted by timothy from the starting-big dept.
cdneng2 writes "The New York Times has this article on a revolutionary new billboard. It uses digital ink, versus the typical CRT, LCD, Neon, or Plasma displays that are so prominent on the newer billboards that wastes electricity. From the article: 'By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens, rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink - or, as Magink executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.' The billboard can display images at 70 frames per second." You can find more articles on the billboard technology on the Magink website.
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Digital Ink On Billboards

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  • Why oh why... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Enoch Root ( 57473 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:26AM (#6983816)
    Why is it that nowadays, any new cool thing is invented either for military or advertising use?

    The day advertising and the military merge, we'll be in a world of hurt. They'll end up creating a pop-up that kills, I tell ya.

  • Great! (Score:2, Funny)

    by PakProtector ( 115173 )
    I know what colour I'm painting my walls next week! Every colour of the spectrum, in a slow rotation cycle defined by background noise and controled by my toaster that runs BSD!

    Or I could just make a lifesize picture of Morgan Webb.

    • Re:Great! (Score:3, Funny)

      by tuba_dude ( 584287 )
      Crap, you got to it first! I definitely think that a wallpaper-like implementation would be sweet. Personally, I'd like a visualization plugin running from xmms or winamp on my walls. That would be perfect for parties! And hell, if you can do that, why not use one when you host a LAN party?

      Jeez...all these ideas...

      Movie Theater
      Game room (Smash Brothers, DDR, Midnight Club 2, blah blah...)
      Computer Display (UT2k3, photo editing, woo!)
      ...Replace the Projector/Whiteboard combo for presentations! Ma

  • revolutionary? not yet. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kevin lyda ( 4803 ) * on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:30AM (#6983831) Homepage
    it's not revolutionary - there have been stories on /. about this for years. revolutionary would be making a laptop using "digital paper" or whatever they're calling it these days. and would they hurry the fsck up?

    combine that with a flash disk or some other form of solid state store and a transmeta or via c3 cpu and you've removed the three biggest power draws on a laptop.

    essentially, i'd like a laptop that could do 24 hours w/o ac power.

    oh, for older stories on /. about this, see here [google.ie].

    • I'm glad this is finally ready for an application. Mainly because it's a reflective rather than emissive display. That means when ambient light is brighter, so is the display, so it should look fine in sunlight. This is unlike CRTs and backlit LCDs which look washed out in bright light. This would free us nerds from lurking in dimly lit, mushroom-conducive workspaces. None of which is to say that this company has finally "solved" the problem, but a first real application is a big step!

    • combine that with a flash disk or some other form of solid state store and a transmeta or via c3 cpu and you've removed the three biggest power draws on a laptop.

      You do realize that all of these technologies do require power when the screen changes, right? So if you're doing video you're consuming power. This may be one reason it's called "digital paper", not "low-power video". And, as such, the chief applications will be replacing static paper displays with mostly-static digital paper displays.

  • My three-year old does this ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by I don't want to spen ( 638810 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:30AM (#6983834) Journal
    Digital ink = finger painting.
  • I've seen photos of billboards, and that's not one. It has the appearance of an LCD with it's poor viewing angle. I hope that the picture displays better than it photographs...

    • It has the appearance of an LCD with it's poor viewing angle.

      This is entirely the point. If only one driver can see the ad at a given time, the billboard owner can sell more targeted advertising space based on the make and model of the car approaching the billboard.

      Besides, LCD viewing angles have got a lot better over the past years. Even in mid-1999, when Rose-Hulman was putting together Acer TravelMate 721TX laptop bundles for its incoming freshmen, the viewing angles were wide enough not to cause

  • e-books (Score:3, Interesting)

    by martinthebrit ( 565913 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:32AM (#6983837)
    Does this technology scale down? Could it provide a solution to e-books that provide as enjoyable an experience as dead trees?

    Disclaimer: I haven't RTFA'd yet. Better go do that now.
    • I'm sure it scales down, but at the moment the cost/durability is prohibitive.

      A billboard provides an idea first market for this tech: It needs to change on a semi-regular basis (but not quickly), allows high initial cost (as long as the long-term cost is within limits), and is moderately protected from harm (at least, compared to a book). This lets them get the tech out and in the market.

      Durability will rise and price will go down. For now, this is a good market to fund development from.

  • whitepaper stats (Score:5, Informative)

    by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:32AM (#6983839) Journal
    From their whitepaper:

    Print quality image

    Combining 5mm pixel pitch, an RGB color model with 4096 colors, and a superior contrast ratio of 14:1, magink digital ink technology achieves an extremely natural look that very much resembles the look of printed images on paper.

    Compatibility to outdoor lighting environment

    magink's digital ink display billboard is reflective of incident light and requires no integrated illumination. Light that falls on the display from either the sun or external light sources is actually beneficial to the visibility of the image. A beautiful image is maintainable under the full range of daylight conditions.

    Low energy consumption

    magink display does not require any power to maintain an image: the image is held under power-off conditions. Only when replacing one image with another does the display require punctual application of power in order to set the new image.

    Since energy is needed only for refreshing the image and since magink's digital ink reflective display does not require back lighting, power consumption is low yielding less energy consumption, less heat dissipation and a longer mean time between failure (MTBF).

    • Re:whitepaper stats (Score:5, Interesting)

      by zakezuke ( 229119 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:43AM (#6983890)
      Compatibility to outdoor lighting environment

      magink's digital ink display billboard is reflective of incident light and requires no integrated illumination. Light that falls on the display from either the sun or external light sources is actually beneficial to the visibility of the image. A beautiful image is maintainable under the full range of daylight conditions.

      I have to admit, this idea is attractive to me, though i'm scared at the fact that i'm actually for a form of advertsing technology.

      My issue is this... near where I live on I-5 there is a huge graphic display billboard. Not sure if it's plasma or LCD or what, but it's one bright sucker It's so bright infact that driving tward it highlights every nick, scratch, bit of dust on my windshield. The reason I invested in a new windshield infact was due to this ultra bright computer generated sign from hell, esp since they don't automaticly dim the sucker based on accurate "sunset/sunrise" times (based on my observation only).

      Now, it's good I replaced my old tattered scrached up windshield, but I shouldn't have to just because of a stupid sign who's technical design by it's very nature requires so much light it's a hazzard to people driving.

  • Wallpaper? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:32AM (#6983842) Journal
    Can it be produced cheaply enough -- and with high enough resolution -- to replace wallpaper?

    Would it work as a large TV monitor? The frame rate is up to 70/sec, so the question, again, is resolution.
    • The pixels are huge - 5mm x 5mm. It's only going to look decent from a distance.

      • 5mm wide pixels means 200 pixels to the meter. This means that a 5m by 4m display would have about the same pixel count as the 1024x768 pixel display I'm typing this on. Widen it to 7m by 4m, and you have a movie screen.

    • Re:Wallpaper? (Score:4, Informative)

      by stevenp ( 610846 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @05:54AM (#6984084)
      >> Would it work as a large TV monitor? The frame rate is up to 70/sec, so the question, again, is resolution.

      This link [eink.com] mentions resolutions in the range 120-150 dpi, but AFAIR one of the first EInk demo screens had about 300 dpi resolution (as a laser printer)
      • The standrard CRT monitor has a DPI in the range of 72-96 dpi, so 150+ dpi is quite high quality

      • Re:Wallpaper? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Psyborgue ( 699890 )
        Based on that DPI, at the size of a billboard, i don't know of any videocard in the world that could drive something like that. for example. create a document say: 5 * 15 feet (and that's being nice). Fill it up with random stuff. Print it off as an uncompressed postscript at 300 dpi. Examine file size... if you can.

        • Tile based rendering (Score:3, Interesting)

          by yerricde ( 125198 )

          Based on that DPI, at the size of a billboard, i don't know of any videocard in the world that could drive something like that.

          OK, one video card probably couldn't handle this resolution, but imagine video cards in a Beowulf cluster. Give each blade the job of driving 1024x1024 pixels' worth of the image, and you have implemented a parallel method of image rendering that is commonly called "tile based rendering".

  • A question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Matrix2110 ( 190829 ) * on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:33AM (#6983845) Journal
    Question: Does anybody know a simple explanation of why they don't go with back lighting or even perhaps rejiggering the dyes and black lighting this?

    I guess I am a CRT snob, but I remember an IBM technology demo showing 400DPI. It was loosely based on LCD technology. It was backlit. Of course it did not have the refresh rate that this sign has.

    Also notice those page sized tiles in the prototype.

    Looks like this technology is heading our way fast.

    • Re:A question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AlecC ( 512609 ) <aleccawley@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @05:14AM (#6983983)
      Same reason you don't have back lighting on a book: it is an absorbtive, not emissive, technology. The coloured elements seem to be opaque, so backlighting wouldn't work.

      There seems to be no reason why they couldn't scale the technology down to PC size. But I think they have targeted the big-ticket applications for their first market - not a stupid idea. If they can replace "million dollar" displays with "80,000 dollar" ones, there are some *big* shot term profits to make the money to fund the mass production line to manufacture cellphone displays at the millions/month level you need to get the costs down.

  • I need another distraction (Score:5, Funny)

    by odenshaw ( 471011 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:35AM (#6983852)
    Now, when I'm driving to work in the morning, a huge TV ad can distract me from driving, talking on my phone, reading the paper, shaving, eating, and putting my pants on.
    How am I supposed to get ready for work!?
    • They never once suggest actually animating an ad. The article constantly refers to "selling ads by the hour." There are good reasons for this.

      One is that a billboard ad is seen by people in passing. If you glance up from your car and take in a tenth of a second from an animated ad you may miss the whole point. A static ad at least has the brand logo on it at all times, which means it impinges on some part of a viewers mind.

      The second reason is that angling for animated ads would probably put Magink out

  • defaceing? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sideswiped ( 259402 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:37AM (#6983863)
    I have a question. I haven't read into digital ink to any great extent,but I was wondering how easly these things coud be defaced? Do magnetic fields have any effect on these babies? If some sort of a electrical charge was dragged over the board how would this effect the image?

    • Re:defaceing? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Generic Guy ( 678542 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @07:33AM (#6984326)

      Magnetic fields? I'd be more worried in what happens when teenagers spray paint these things, as they tend to do.

      Or thinking more specifically about my area (Detroit), how does this billboard handle a couple of handgun shells unloaded into it?

    • Not magnetic fields. Electrostatic. The units I've seen use electrostatic fields. However, I don't think you could significantly affect them; the "paper" is inside a conductive cage (the front is a transparent conductor) so an outside field won't affect them. You'd have to hack into the controller.

  • It requires no power! Not good... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Lobsang ( 255003 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:37AM (#6983864) Homepage
    The display requires no power, only when changing images. Images are retained when the power is off.

    Does it mean that, when my boss comes into my room and I'm watching pr0n, just turning my laptop off in panic will leave a big pr0n screen still visible?

    Not good, not good...

  • Your Message Here, in a Flash (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Your Message Here, in a Flash
    By MICHEL MARRIOTT

    IN an industrial building on the Jersey City waterfront, workers busily printed supersize images for building facades and billboards intended to paper even the most casual viewer with brand awareness. Suspended near the rafters were full-color images of the youth tribes of Gap and giant emblems of National Basketball Association teams; on a far wall a portrait of a Seagram's vodka bottle hung two stories high.

    In another corner, near the executive offices of N
    • Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink.

      HOLY SHIT, I would have never made that connection, it's completely counter-intuitive, and definitely not something that jumps right out at you.

  • Their Web site says that the system... (Score:5, Funny)

    by JessLeah ( 625838 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:40AM (#6983873)
    ...runs Windows.

    Is this really the best choice for something that thousands (or tens of thousands) of people will see each day as they drive down the highway?

    At the PATH [pathrail.com] terminals in New Jersey, they have "PATHVision" displays. They run Windows. For a long time, virtually every day, pretty much half of the terminals were displaying an error dialog or worse. I also think I saw one of their ticket vending machines displaying a BSoD.

    I really wish that companies who come up with stuff this cool would not depend so heavily on Windows. Imagine driving down the highway and seeing a gigantic, 50-foot-wide Blue Screen of Death. If my experiences with the PATHVision monitors were an example of what is to come... well, it could happen!

    Here [bloomu.edu] is what happens when airports depend upon Windows...

  • Specs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @04:42AM (#6983883) Journal
    From Magink's website:

    Key Features and Benefits


    Print quality image
    Combining 5mm pixel pitch, an RGB color model with 4096 colors, and a superior contrast ratio of 14:1


    5mm = .5cm. Rather large for TV, but it could make a decent if blocky wallpaper.

    The smallest frame size is 1m x 2m, so that would be 200 x 400 pixels, bigger than a Palm Pilot and bigger in pixel count but less square than a Zaurus.

    4096 colors is low compared to a modern PC.
  • video images at more than 70 frames a second, twice the speed needed to produce smooth, cinematic motion

    Thats all very well but what are the response times like? Practically all LCDs have a 60fps refresh time, but with a respone of 30ms or more, fast moving images would look horrid, leaving lots of streaks. The article doesn't mention the dot-pitch specs of these digital ink screens either, I'd like to see what sort of resolution and at what size these things could produce. If it had a fast enough repons
    • The NYT article mentions 70Hz, but the technology white paper says:

      'Refresh rate : approximately 2 seconds'

      2 seconds is more like the response time I heard last time I looked at this sort of technology .. so have MagInk made some huge stride to get it to 70Hz or is this fiction ?

      • Re:Response Time & Dot Pitch? (Score:5, Informative)

        by koniosis ( 657156 ) <koniosisNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @06:41AM (#6984188)
        response time is different from refresh, i'll explain. If you take a normal LCD they usually have a 60Hz refresh and say 25-30ms response. What this means is that the LCD can show 60 different frams every second. However, the response time measures how long it takes for the LCD to change frames, the longer the time the longer the last image that was on the LCD is displayed, so if you have a high response time (25ms is considered normal but not good) then you will get "streaking" effects, where the previous frames overlap with the new frames. This can cause a horrible image and is very noticeable when the frames are very different e.g. fast motion graphics (films, games). Newer LCDs report a 16ms response, which makes streaking almost invisible in most cases. So you see, this is why I wanted to know what the response of the ink is.

        Also you may be wondering about TVs and their response time, T.Vs and Monitors (CRT) don't have a response time (or more to the point its the same as the refresh) because on a CRT screen the previous frame is not remembered as the "pixels" on a CRT so to speak, need to be constatly energised to display anything, so the second that the cathode ray stops hitting the phosphor the image dissapears, thus no reponse time.

        • T.Vs and Monitors (CRT) don't have a response time (or more to the point its the same as the refresh) because on a CRT screen the previous frame is not remembered as the "pixels" on a CRT so to speak, need to be constatly energised to display anything, so the second that the cathode ray stops hitting the phosphor the image dissapears, thus no reponse time.

          What I think you meant to say was that the response time of a CRT is much smaller than the response time of an LCD.

          The way a CRT works is that the ele

        • I haven't read the white paper, but if this technology is similar to other e-ink ones, then it's impossible to merge two frames. The pixels can only show one colour at a time and so when you switch to a new frame, the old one have to disappear. So I believe the response time must be a non-issue.

  • Bah. (Score:2)

    by oGMo ( 379 )

    I thought this was going to be something that was cool, like eink [eink.com]. Maybe there's more to this they don't talk about, but I've seen displays that look like this at the local theater.

    The ones I've seen look like real-life versions of vertical banner ads (coincidentally enough). Just a big LCD-ish display, whatever the actual technology. They're somewhat eyecatching in that they move, but... when it comes down to it, it's just an ad. Big deal.

    Of course, I can think of more interesting uses for the syst

  • I can just see it all now (Score:3, Funny)

    by TyrranzzX ( 617713 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @05:11AM (#6983972) Journal
    A family in their minivan riding down the road, all of a sudden a billboard flashing red and yellow advertising viagra pops out of nowhere distracting hundreds of drivers causing a car accidents all over.

    Seriously. Good intention, bad idea. At least it'll give hacker groups the ability to show their views to the world.
  • Let's try scaling this technology up the curve a little:

    - 10-bit color (4096 colors) will become 16-bit and then 24-bit.
    - 5mm pixels will become 1mm and then 1/10thmm
    - the borders between the pages appear 1 pixel wide, and will thus vanish
    - cost of $8,000 will drop to $2,500, then $500.

    Yes, looks good!

  • A PDA that you can scroll the screen out to a decent size and when finished scroll it up and back into your pocket.

    Thank you Lord for SciFi leading the way in Development of technology

    • Needleless injections from Startrek
    • Personal Communicators from Startrek
    • Smokey Screens for projecting images from Seaquest DSV
    • Flexible screens from Earth Final Conflict

    I am a part time Sci-fi fan, you full time addicts must have some more examples Dont try to think outside the square - Instead realize there are no lim

  • Speaking of neon. . . (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ahfoo ( 223186 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @05:36AM (#6984045) Journal
    How about using a display like this with flourescent particles and then surrounding it in heavy UV argon/mercury tubes.
    I'm just thinking that if it's so much like paper, then that's one of the ways paper billboards are enhanced for better nighttime viewing.
    Cartoon images could potentially be quite intense. Think of, for instance, the Simpsons done this way.
    But as cool as this is, I still think that in the long-term we're going to see effiecient, mass produced, high powered lasers dominate the outdoor display market and perhaps other display markets as well. But since high powered lasers are still a very long way from cheap at this point, this is a cool near-term solution.
  • How long before they get sued by someone who crashes their car after being distracted by a moving image one a billboard....

  • Screw Billboards (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @05:42AM (#6984060) Homepage
    What I want is to cover all the walls of my crappy little dorm room with it. How cool would it be to transform your room into a beach. Even cooler would be that it could be animated! I could sit back and watch the waves crash on the shore. Or, if for some reason a female were to come over, I could transform my room into the ultimate bachelor pad simply by changing the display program.

    If this were advanced sufficiently, I could then even play bf1942 on this once I realized said female was imaginary and never came over in the first place.

    • Re:Screw Billboards (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Or, if for some reason a female were to come over,

      Even technology has its limits.
    • Wait, I'm confused...

      So was the female in your room imaginary, or was the fact that she was "coming" in your room imaginary?

      I hate to say this, but maybe you could stand to surf maybe just a little pr0n on your wall-screens. As an educational tool. Just remember to erase it or the presence of the female will also be imaginary.


      The sexing of toads is expressly prohibited within the bounds of this post.

  • Ah, now I understand... (Score:5, Funny)

    by supertsaar ( 540181 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @05:42AM (#6984061) Homepage Journal
    From the f. article

    "...an innovation by a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink..."
    Pfew. Glad they explained that, I'd
    never-ever would have guessed that.

  • Ah, perfect for my car (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tenebrious1 ( 530949 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @06:10AM (#6984115) Homepage
    Some days my car should be red. Some days blue. Some days a nice mauve. Then polka dots that change colors. How about flames that really flicker? Can't imagine flames on my wagon, but why not? Checkerboard? Heck, you can actually play checkers! Or chess. Or Othello. Backgammon. Hah, you can even play tetris. I can have my phone number flash on the side when I pass a cute girl (oh wait, I drive a wagon). I can have messages flash on the back telling that moron driving 30 in a 50 what I think of them. There's a world of possibilities here!

    • Has anybody thought of active camoflague yet?

      It would work great on the polygonal slab-sides of an M1-Abrahams tank...

      Just think... you look down the street and think that the pepsi-cola vending machine looked a little distorted, but it could just be the dust and heat... and then a voice crackles over your radio "Hammer 34... in position..."

      which is when you notice that there are a set of treads incongrously sitting under the pepsi cola mahine and most of a bus stop.

      On the other hand if tanks could hide

    • Re:Ah, perfect for my car (Score:4, Funny)

      by buttahead ( 266220 ) <tscanlanNO@SPAMsosaith.org> on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @09:34AM (#6985031) Homepage
      just a little nit-pik here:

      I can have messages flash on the back telling that moron driving 30 in a 50 what I think of them

      if he is going slow, and is behind you... you might want to display "sorry, I'm driving 30 in a 50 zone... I'm a moron, please pass me".

    • I can have messages flash on the back telling that moron driving 30 in a 50 what I think of them.

      Did you ever consider that the only reason this "moron" is driving so slow is that you are in his way?

    • I park my car in the middle of summer. As I get out and lock up, the car senses the temperature and time of day, the body turns white and the windows all go mirror-refelctive. When I get back, the inside of the car is ambient air temperature instead of 140F.

      In the winter, the car body goes black and the windows stay clear, keeping the inside warm and reducing the snow and ice buildup.

      In either case, I come out of the shopping center, push a button on my keychain, and the car's color starts flashing betw
  • But the surface of this billboard is not a liquid crystal diode screen...

    Of course, it seems serious when one explain acronyms like LCD. But mixing display and diode, even if errors does happen, is not good presage for the quality of the research in the article. Smell like corporate announcement camouflaged as news.

    a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink

    What is the level of the NYT reader? Even me, not native english speaker, had compreh

  • In other words: (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @06:48AM (#6984206)
    In other words, they failed to get the resolution high enough for use in displays and standard digital paper, and now they only thing it's good for is billboards. Cool, but not nearly as cool as what all the digital ink companies promised we'd have by now.

  • Dangerous? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by the uNF cola ( 657200 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @07:51AM (#6984397)
    This can be a little dangerous, if placed near to highways.

    If you live in NYC, and have driven down the west side high way, there's a billboard, a tv billboard, which you see when you drive south around 23rd street in Manhattan. Am I the only one who gets a little distracted by these things? Anytime I pass by, I have to make a concerted effort NOT to have my eyes flit back and forth.

    What about the ones in Times Square you may ask? They are MUCH MUCH higher up, out of line of sight for drivers. This one is about 3 stories high at about a few hundred feet away from the road. Ideal for drivers watching.

  • In this country, we have a few billboards which consist of a row of triangular prisms, disposed vertically, parallel to one another, and able to revolve on spindles. At one end of each spindle is a cog wheel, and a chain connects them all to a motor. As the motor turns, all the prisms revolve together. A limit switch is used to detect when the flat sides line up together. This whole assembly is mounted in a shallow box. Three posters are cut up and slices of each affixed around the prisms in such a wa

  • The future is not set ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Chran ( 142121 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @07:57AM (#6984425) Homepage Journal
    Shades of Minority Report [imdb.com]...

    But imagine the possibilities.
    A series of sci-fi books by Stephen Baxter [pushby.com] (The Manifold Sequence) describe technology like this.

    They use flat, flexible view screens that can be used anywhere.

    This is very exciting.

    But of course it will be used for advertising...

  • Ads based on what you are listening to (Score:4, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @08:21AM (#6984564)
    The Sept 12 dead tree edition of the Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on companies that deploy billboards that change throughout the day -- one intended application for these digital ink billboards.

    The most interesting variant uses a roadside scanner that detects which radio stations are tuned in on the various cars going by the sign. The system then aggregates the data on who is listening to what and decides what ad message to put up. If most people are listening to the game, maybe an ad for the local sports bar will appear. If a cluster of classical music listeners drives past, then an ad for season tickets to the opera might briefly appear.

    There's no word on whether the system can tell which MP3 file you are listening to. Yet.

  • The material? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by computerlady ( 707043 )

    I'm curious about the "tiny helix-shaped particles." What the heck are they?

    • Re:The material? (Score:3, Informative)

      by buzy buzy ( 594932 )
      It is made from two pannels with particals between them.

      This is essentially the paper.

      The particals are coloured Red/Green/Blue on one side and Black on the other.

      A static charge can cause a partical to rotate in it's position between the layers and show for instance either red or black.

      Now just think of these as pixels and you get the idea.
  • I remember seeing this technology well over a year ago (maybe 2 or 3) where they were using this "smart paper" for electronic price tags in stores. As prices changed (e.g. for a sale) the store computer would simply send a signal to the paper to change the content.

    This was only available in black and white (well black and light grey anyway) but they were discussing how to do colour back then. This is mealy an extension of that technology.

    This will be interesting for making redundant traditional billboards
  • it will dissappear very quickly, and wind up hung on my bedroom wall.. hee hee.. anybody have a flatbed truck in the virginia area?

  • Easily overlooked part of the article (Score:3, Funny)

    by SurturZ ( 54334 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2003 @10:07AM (#6985313) Homepage Journal
    The article describes the billboard as "...an innovation by a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink."

    Lucky they mentioned that. At first I thought the name was a combination of the words "Ma" and "Gink".

    TYFYA,
    --#>SurturZ
  • it doesn't emit light, it only reflects it.

    if i got a new flatscreen of this stuff for my computer, i'd lose my 'soothing green glow'!
  • I know of someone, hehe, that grabbed a marker from the tray under one of those plastic whiteboards and wrote in big letters: PERMANENT MARKER!. Then he looked at the marker he wrote it with - OMG! It WAS a permanent marker. This person I know of was very glad nobody was in the room to witness this aparently malicious, but truely accidental vandalism. The person discreetly left the room and 'booked it'.

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