TeleRead Update #10 | Return to TeleRead Home Page
A Few
Words on Butterflies,
Puddles, Rainbow Screens and Electronic Books
Every good pooh-pooher of electronic books must pontificate on the shortcomings of computer screens, especially those of portables. Screens drain batteries too quickly. They blur. Or text and background merge infuriatingly. The monitors of desktop machines also fall short, and it is not just the flicker of the cheaper models. Try curling up on your sofa with a NEC MultiSync XV17+. If a deity had wanted us to read e-books, He would have given us cords and plugs, so we could skip the screens and let the words go directly from printed circuit boards to our brains.
Then
again, what if something as low-tech as a puddle or a butterfly
wing could help pave the way for sharp, flickerless,
high-contrast screens that could work with computers optimized
for the reading of books? Suppose these displays were as easy to
read as paper and sucked up less than a tenth of the battery
power that other portable screens did.
No, this
nirvana isn't here yet. But Xerox
already has made screens with laser-level
resolution, even if they are battery hogs. 3M has developed Liquid Crystal
Displays that are brighter
than normal or, if you'd prefer, much less greedy with battery
power. Depends on the configuration. Important work is
also going on at Kent
State. Over at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, meanwhile, researchers
are working toward books
that could display changeable
text on flippable pages. To me as a civilian, however, an
equally intriguing possibility may be a technology that imitates
an oily puddle or butterfly wing and shows up on a fixed screen.
If you
pour a little oil into a puddle in the sunlight, you'll see a
rainbow in the water; different materials are coming together,
and a multicolored reflection ensues. The same happens when a
butterfly flaps its wings. "Reflect" is a key word with
the new technology, too. It doesn't need backlighting, and you
can read in bright or dim light, just as with a book. Not
surprisingly, then, given the importance of reflection,
"Iridigm" one of the names of the new technology. The
"Iri" stands for iridescence, and the "digm"
is short for "paradigm" or model. Another name is
"IMod," which stands for, ugh, "Interferometric
Modulator." I myself prefer two friendlier
terms--"rainbow display" and "rainbow
screen"--even if they may not be unique enough to send
trademark lawyers or technologists into deepest ecstasy.
Unlike a
rainbow in a puddle, a rainbow display lets humans control the
hues and shapes, so that the screen can spell out words and show
photographic and even TV-fast images in color. As described by
the Iridigm Display Corporation of Boston, the display is like
this. A network of little roads traverses the screen, and scads
of tiny bridges cross each of the roads. Electrostatic charges
vary the heights of the bridges over the roads, changing the
colors and also producing blacks and whites as needed. The
bridges are made of an aluminum and the roads are made of a
material similar to one used to coat eye-glasses.
Mini-interstates
aside, are extra-high-quality displays about to hit Radio Shack
next month so we can read War and
Peace with no more wear on our eyes than paper would
give us? No. The Iridigm Display Corporation is commendably
anti-hype. Erik J. Larson, the president, says the contrast is
not good enough right now; and beyond that, it would be
impossible at present to produce a good rainbow screen that was
big enough for book-reading. Among the first beneficiaries may be
the tiny displays on cellular telephones. But Larson, an M.I.T.
grad like the inventor, Mark Miles, believes that larger screens
for notebook and tablet computers will arrive in the next few
years.
What's
more, Larson predicts that contrast will improve to the point
where the text will stand out just as much as on glossy white
paper. Even more impressively, resolution could at least match
that of the power-hungry Xerox displays and maybe even reach 1000
dots per inch, although, as a practical matter, 300-600 dpi
should suffice. No flicker will torture you; a rainbow screen is
not a cathode ray tube with electronics scanning every whichway
across the screen. Nor will you feel as if constantly gawking at
a florescent light. On top of that, a rainbow screen can survive
a drop on floor or an Arizona sun blazing through a car window.
One
downside of rainbow screens is that they cannot yet give you
hi-fi color. Another challenge is the complexity of making them,
the precision required to set out those little roads and bridges.
The technology would require hundreds of millions for the
factories. Prices of the displays themselves will be in the
hundreds of dollars at the start, or too high for the throwaway
computers that I would love to see.
Still,
Larson expects that prices will undercut those for active-matrix
screens, the ones with the best display quality in mass use right
now on existing portables. And the technology could use factories
now making liquid crystal displays. Considering the miracles of
mass production in slashing prices, we might yet be talking about
truly bargain-priced displays in the end.
If rainbow
screens pan out, I see them as a great technology for TeleRead, a
three-part proposal to upgrade the old-fashioned kind of literacy
along with the computer kind. First, a focused procurement
program for schools and libraries could encourage the use of
privately owned, tablet-style computers that excelled for
reading. Second, a well-stocked national digital library would
put books online for rich and poor for free, with fair
compensation to copyright holders. Third, TeleRead could
cost-justify the digital library by popularizing electronic
forms, which could run on the same little computers and save
billions in paperwork even if just a fraction of the population
used them. A TeleReader machine could work fine with a pen
interface. In other words, by touching a stylist the right way
against the proper part of the screen, you could move from page
to page or chapter to chapter within an electronic book. Or you
could use the pen to fill out an electronic form. Yes, Larson
says a pen interface would be just as possible with a rainbow
display as with a conventional LCD screen.
Imagine if
TeleRead were around to whet the interest of investors and
consumers in technologies such as Iridigm's, 3M's and Xerox's.
TeleRead could start very small and build slowly as screens
improved for reading electronic books, and as electronic forms
grew in popularity. Let's hope that Larson, Miles and associates
succeed. If not, others eventually will. Already Iridigm Display
has enjoyed financing from large corporate partners, and the
number of people at Iridigm will soon grow from two to twelve.
Significantly,
however, the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, not the private sector, underwrote
Miles' early research in rainbow screens. This technology goes
back to the 1980s, but seems more practical these days because of
recent developments in manufacturing techniques. Commendably
here, Washington took the long view, and, just as with the
Internet, it did not just entrust the original R&D to the
vagaries of the private market. While we should deplore
technodoggles, there is a place for carefully spent money and
enlightened leadership from our national government. Perhaps the
White House and Congress can live up to the pro-literacy rhetoric
so dear to politicians, and use TeleRead to help accelerate
demand for the right screens and other hardware for reading
e-books.