Digital paper - as lightweight and flexible as newsprint, as mutable as words on a screen, as permanent as RAM - is getting real. Developed at Xerox PARC, Electronic Paper will soon be in production at 3M, and by mid-2000 will be as much a fact of life, its developers say, as the dead-tree stuff. Gyricon, the technology behind epaper, is a thin sheet of flexible plastic made of millions of microspheres; each tiny bead is half black, half white, and its orientation - which color is facing "up" - is controlled electrically (www.parc.xerox.com/dhl/projects/epaper). You could package epaper between glass plates as an alternative to LCDs, says PARC engineer Matt Howard, who works with gyricon inventor Nick Sheridon, "but the flexible form factor and the low power requirements allow more exciting applications." Think of a low-cost, large-area display - an alternative to the Jumbotron. Imagine a page of Wall Street Journal stock quotes as up-to-the-minute as the market ticker. Paper has turned a page.
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