Philips has been working on a new, full color e-paper technology that uses only ambient light, and gives the effect of paints on paper. This new technology will not be used as you might think–it won’t be found in the next Kindle, Nook or e-reader. It won’t be used to create newspapers or e-readers or magazines, not yet anyway. Philips plans on leveraging the new technology in a unique and pretty cool new way: using it to skin electronic devices.
Customizing Your Cell Phone
One of the first applications will be for skinning your cell phone. That is, the outside of the device will be coated with this special e-paper, and then you can decide on how it will look depending on your mood, ambient lighting, or whether or not you want it to match your outfit for that day. It takes the idea of customizing your appliances to a whole new level.
According to Philips, you can download patterns, textures or just chose a color and press a button. The e-paper around the device updates itself automatically, and since it uses traditional e-paper it can last for a long amount of time without wasting the battery on your cellphone. Since it doesn’t use backlighting, it will look just like the cellphone had been painted with that pattern, texture or color.
Scaling Up
Even though the initial application will be towards smaller devices, like MP3 players and cell phones, Philips says that the technology can easily scale upwards, and be used in wall-paper for rooms, allowing you to change the wall-paper pattern in your house without re-papering or painting the walls. They also mention using this with ambient technology, combining it’s use with LED’s and OLED’s. OLED lights will be used to set the right, ambient lighting in the room, and then all of the e-paper coated applications can change their skins to match the lighting.
One example is using it in a hospital, where the lighting is used to make the patient feel welcomed and the room inviting. The e-paper would be used to coat the MRI machine, the walls and other bits of technology, creating a cohesive, inviting and entertaining atmosphere.
How it Works
We all know how regular e-ink technology works– by suspending particles in a solution and then changing the color of the particle based on a charge. A positive charge would turn it to either black or white, and the opposite happens for a negative charge. Philips has turned this technology sidewise, using something they call in-plane electrophoresis. They apply the electrical charge parallel to the particle, rather than perpendicular. This allows many different colors to rise to a particle, as well as turning it completely transparent, two things the current crop of e-paper technologies do not do.
This can allow for not just colored e-ink technology, but also using multiple planes of e-paper in a single device, to create a three dimensional effect and giving actual distance to an image.
When Can We Use it?
While we don’t have an exact launch date for when this technology will be hitting the shelves, we do know that Philips will be discussing it and showing the technology off first hand during this year’s International Display Workshop in Japan. Even though Philips doesn’t plan on porting this technology to traditional e-ink and e-paper applications (like advertising or e-readers), they will be licensing the technology to third party technological partners.
How else do you think this technology can be used?
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