FRANKFURT (dpa) – For decades, researchers have been working on the development of electronic paper.
Such an invention, proponents have contended, could one day make paper versions of newspapers, books, and notebooks obsolete. The material is thin like paper, can be rolled up like newspaper and can, with the aid of electronic ink, display any desired text.
Now, two world-renowned research institutions want to help electronic paper make its long-awaited breakthrough.
After years of research, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are in a head-to-head race with each other over who will have the first commercially successful version of the invention.
“We anticipate our first practical application of our electronic paper to occur in 2001,” says Patrick Mazeau of the Xerox Research Center (XRCE) in Grenoble, Switzerland.
Mazeau has already demonstrated an initial prototype of electronic paper developed by Xerox’s legendary PARC facility. In anticipation of the technology’s commercialization, Xerox founded the firm Gyricon Media at the end of last year.
Before 2001 is out, the subsidiary of Xerox intends to produce a cheap, light, and energy-saving document which could, for example, be implemented as advertising space or as digital price signs at supermarkets.
Xerox isn’t the only one working on electronic paper, though.
This year the firm E-Ink of Cambridge, Massachusetts, presented for the first time a flexible display that is less than 1 millimetre thick.
Similar to the Xerox document, the document can be rolled up like a newspaper and can display a black-and-white image of up to 12 by 12 centimetres.
The scientists at E-Ink, which was founded in 1997 by MIT researchers Barrett Comiskey and J.D. Albert, have printed a total of 256 small transistors onto a thin artificial foil.
This film is in turn coated with a layer of tiny microcapsules. If a capsule is supplied with power, it moves up to the surface and, along with its brethren, makes up part of the programmed image.
“We have shown that E-Ink, in tandem with the worldwide leading producers, is in a position to develop the next generation of displays for electronic devices,” says E-Ink head Jim Juliano.
The electronic paper could be bound up as a book or newspaper or put to work with various kinds of electronic devices. The devices should, unlike the so-called electronic books, feel like paper, thereby avoiding giving the reader the feeling that he is sitting in front of a laptop computer.
Whether for daily newspapers, handheld monitors, or digital ad space, the idea of endlessly resettable electronic paper has been around for about 25 years and has a particularly up-and-down history.
Back in the early 1970s, Nick Sheridon, a researcher at the Xerox PARC facility, first explored alternatives to computer monitors, which back then had flickering, dark images – thoroughly eye- fatiguing.
Sheridon developed the technology that even today is at the core of electronic paper.
Microscopically small balls that are dark on one side and light on the other rotate according to an electric current. Depending on which side of the microscopic balls is shown – dark or light a text or image can be formed.
Yet Sheridon’s invention awakened little interest at Xerox. The device almost suffered the same fate of so many other products created by the PARC lab. Xerox also invented the computer mouse and the graphical computer interface, two features that are today universal with every computer.
Yet it wasn’t Xerox that marketed these technologies to enormous success – it was companies such as Apple Computers and Microsoft.
It was only in the 1990s that Xerox began advertising the electronic paper again as a facet of the future, as an example of a technology that would win a place in the everyday life of people. This was roughly the same time that MIT began their work on the practical application of the technology as well.
