Communications of the ACM has an article on the development of color paper screens. According to them it is in the works using several different technologies.
Here are a few things I learned:
electronic paper was developed in 1975 by Nick Sheridon at Xerox PARC, who is now part of a spin-off called Gyricon LLC, and he says that current monochrome technologies cannot be modified to do color;
Philips Research is working on color displays using a techlology called in-plane electrophoretics, which is different from E Ink’s electrophoresis technique;
The Novel Devices Lab at the University of Cincinnati is working on a technology called electrofluidic display whose pigments, they say, look as good as they would on paper;
Sheridon believes that e-paper will eventually make current desktop displays obsolete.
Lots more interesting stuff in the article. Thanks to Dan Bloom for the link.
I’ve always thought screens would eventually become full-colour/reflective and replace our emissive ones. We could end up with some kind of gadget all covered with some colour e-ink, touch sensitive surface, like a featureless soft pad in wich we could download and install “skins”/GUIs along with the operating system. And haptic feedback all over the pad.
re “….Thanks to Dan Bloom for the link.”
And thanks to Daniel Ferguson, kindergarten teacher in Japan with a deep interest in reading education on his blog too, for tipping me to this link. He found it, I was just relaying it. But yes, a very interesting article.