Disposable E-Paper On The Prototype Tip
So you're totally tired of all the old ways. Books? Useless. You're not into the whole "retro" thing, and you want people to know that you're on the cutting edge. The technology edge. So what do you think that heavenly next thing is? How about some disposable e-paper? University of Cincinnati electrical engineering professor Andrew Steckl decided he wanted that too. So what did he do? He demonstrated that electrowetting works on a paper substrate just as well as it does on glass. What's that mean? It means there's going to be some e-paper on paper.
Electrowetting, incase you were unaware, is the process of applying (wetting) a hydrophobic surface with a field of electricity within a display – aka, the thing you do when your computer shows you some type, some photographs, some video, everything. It's the "revealing", if you will, most recently applied to e-paper.
What Steckl and his researcher pals aim to do is "replicate the look and feel of actual ink on paper, ... We have, therefore, investigated the use of paper as the perfect substrate for EW devices to accomplish e-paper on paper." What would this be good for? Steckl says "We would have something that is very cheap, very fast, full-color and at the end of the day or the end of the week, you could pitch it into the trash."
What would I use that for instead of a regular piece of paper? Steckl says: "We hope to have something that would actually look like paper but behave like a computer monitor in terms of its ability to store information." OHHH ok. So maybe I'd be able to brush it off, or save some info to a separate memory chip, say a thumb drive. But what about the fact that you'd totally be destroying the environment by throwing away all that technology day-to-day? Steckl says the impact will be low. This guy seems like a boss. You can get the entire text of the paper "Electrowetting on Paper for Electronic Paper Display" by Duk Young Kim and Andrew J. Steckl from [ACS Publications] for $30 for 48 hours or reading. Whoa!
[Via TGDaily]