TechStuff Looks at e-paper

What is e-paper? TechStuff looks at the properties of e-paper and how it's used.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from how
stuff works dot Com pays everyone and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm Jonathan strictly and I'm Lauren foc Obama and Lauren Today,
I wanted to read a message that was sent to
us via Twitter. Danny sent us to us and said,
I have done an episode on the paper. Well, Danny,

(00:26):
we we did an episode we being tech stuff in
general way back, yeah, back in two thousand and eight.
If Jonathan and Chris did an episode called how the
Books Work. If you want to listen to that, probably
very short episode. It was pushed on November of that year.
But we figured that, you know, although the answer is
technically yes, we have, we we thought that it was

(00:49):
time for update, especially since the one that Chris and
I did we really only covered one implementation and we
were specifically looking at e inc, which we'll talk about
again in this episode. But there it turns out people
didn't weren't satisfied with just one implementation for this E
paper idea. They decided to have a whole bunch of

(01:09):
mind bending, lee complicated science E implementations that caused me
to weep at my desk. Um the poor, the poor
fellow with the English literature degree. But but I wanted
to mention, first of all, you know what exactly is
the paper before we go into any of the implementations.
Why would you want an e paper display? What is

(01:31):
so special about this particular type of display? Well, everything
electronic is better. Well they're okay, one, it's electronics, so
clearly better than any kind of regular paper. So wins
over that. It's sometimes in scientific circles referred to as
reflective electronic paper. And reflective is kind of the key

(01:53):
term there because many screens are backlit, which causes which
is awesome for various tchnologies of making you see stuff,
but is pretty energy and efficient and also hard to
see in really brightly lit areas. Right, So, for example,
if we were to be watching some sort of amazing

(02:14):
movie in a dark theater cave, we want something that's
back lit, right, we want something that's projecting its own
light or else you can't see anything. But if you're outside,
say at the beach, or if you have a lamp on,
yeah you've got Maybe you are just trying to read
something simple and and also you just maybe you find
that backlit display gets your makes your eyes tired after

(02:36):
a while. It does lead to tired eyes. So you
might want something where you're just putting light onto the
device and then just reading based upon the light that's
reflecting back to you. And that's what the paper is
all about. It's really trying to mimic what actual paper
does all by itself. So if you have a piece
of paper and you've written stuff on it, and you're

(02:57):
reading the stuff on that paper, newsplash, paper is not
sending light into your eyeballs. It's a reflecting light from
some other source back to you most of the time. Yeah, right,
if it's E paper and it is back lit, then
I guess it could. Though again, most e paper, as
we'll discuss, is not. Now there there's another advantage, like
you said, the energy factor. Right, If I'm using a

(03:19):
backlit display, that means there has to be some sort
of light source that's shining out at me, and that
requires energy for that to continue. We don't have some
magical way to just make light come out without using energy.
But a lot of these E paper displays have very
energy efficient means of establishing some sort of image on

(03:39):
the display and holding it there without havingout needing to
continue pouring energy into the system exactly, so you have
the two benefits there, the ability to look at this
display in really well lit areas and the fact that
it's not sipping tons of energy. Uh. They also, depending
upon the implementation, can be flexible, So flex will displays

(04:00):
are a pretty cool idea for a lot of different
uh potential applications. A lot of them are kind of
advertising related well sure, but you know also the just
the pure concept of being able to take your your
e book and roll it up and stick it in
your backpack. Sure, or or have like an e paper
display watch. I have an e paper display watch. The

(04:21):
pebble which I'm wearing right now has an papers to it.
In case you guys couldn't see that via the radio, right,
it sometimes doesn't come across with the point point, but
it has an e paper display. But you could also
create an e paper display watch that is very very
thin and flexible so that you could have it wrap
around your whole wrist. And in fact, there are a
few examples of that. A Japanese company made some really

(04:43):
really super cool ones that I think was a limited
run of five hundreds. They ended up being around twenty
bucks apiece, but they look great and and yes, and
this is all leading towards your incredible dream of having
the electronic gauntlets. Yes, I won't be happy until I
have of the e bracer, where again I can have
all the little things like my my life force telling

(05:07):
me how how much life force I have left, you know,
in case I'm not aware of it at the time.
You know, because I encounter some tough customers in my
line of work, and sometimes exactly how tough they are. Yeah,
and sometimes you you have to look at and see, like, well,
let me let me guess how much of a beating
can I take before I'm done? But all that being said,

(05:30):
what where did this idea come from? Where where did
we start really talking about eat ink and e paper.
Even though the whole idea of this electronic display, of
a reflective electronic display hit the public consciousness just in
the past decade or so due to the popularity of
the books and e readers and to kindle all of

(05:50):
that kind of thing, um, the technology has actually been
in development since the nineteen seventies. Some researchers at Xerox
began experimenting with what they called gyra con it sounds
like a transformer I love so much. Right, um. And
these were little spheres of electrically charged plastic that were
white on one side and black on the other and
could rotate, hence the gyra kind of word there um.

(06:14):
And they were suspended in oil between transparent electrodes. It
could be used for signs, but they never really worked
it out to be many miniaturized to the point of
being really useful for something like a personal device, and
it kind of was overlooked for a few decades until
the nineteen nineties when H M. I T and then

(06:35):
a related Cambridge based company called e ink Corp. Began
developing their own version of these gyrating electronic inc capsules
in right, And of course the majorization important for multiple purposes. Right,
not just so that you can have it fit into
a form factor like an e book or a watch,

(06:55):
but also just the idea of getting the right kind
of resolution or up close viewing. Like you don't need
it to be as as a higher resolution for like
a sign outside, right, you need you need to be
legible outside, but it doesn't have to have really sharp edges.
You don't have to be able to get two inches
away from it and right right. Whereas with books, you know,

(07:15):
you're getting pretty up close and personal, and with a
watch even more so. So obviously that was one of
those things that need to be worked out. So how
do they work today? Well, like I said at the
very beginning, there are a lot of different implementations now
that should not come as a huge surprise because with
with displays in general, there are lots of ways of
having a display show you stuff. Yeah. I think about televisions, yeah, tons,

(07:39):
Like if we're talking just the flat screen type, you
have plasma, you have l E ED, you have l
C D. Then of course you have the good old
cathode ray tube televisions of our childhood. Yeah, so they'll
own one of those, do you. It's fancy. I think
I have one in a garage somewhere and it's heavy. Um,

(07:59):
but the nice fancy I think I'm meant heavy. The
nice thing is that some of our old gaming consoles
will still work with those because the ports match, right, yep. Yeah,
it's one of those things that you give up, you know,
you start to see these these technologies no longer become compatible.
That's I do still have a S N E S. Yeah,
and you can't run that on a modern television without
some some version, yeah, converter. So let's talk about the

(08:24):
different types of E paper display technology. I think the
most popular one on the market certainly right now is
electrophoretic technology. That's correct, that is what e INK uses,
the one that you mentioned, and e Ink, I think
is the is the most well known company that does this.
This is the story of technology you find in a

(08:44):
lot of e readers, and so this uses that electrical
charge to push stuff around. So the ink in an
electrophoretic technology display can be lots of different stuff off.
But the typically you'll you'll find these little plastic beads
that may be dual colored where you have white on

(09:07):
one side and black on the other, like I mentioned before,
or some that are black and some that are white. Right,
you would just have two different separate kinds of beads,
and you would have them uh oppositely charged. So let's
say that the the white beads are positively charged and
the black beads are negatively charged. Now, the top layer,
the screen layer, the part that we are looking at

(09:28):
our eyeballs are hitting. That is clear, it's transparent. Otherwise
it wouldn't be very useful. We had a solid plastic
E reader that that was opaque, it wouldn't do you
any good, not very much. Now, on the opposite side,
the foundation of the device, that's the back pain. That's
where everything is built on top of. So let's say
you have an electrode down over on the back pain.
You've got one on the peer level as well. And

(09:51):
you you remember, you've got the the white beads that
have a positive charge and the black beads that have
a negative charge. If you create a negative charge at
the bay at the back pain, then that's going to
repel all those black beads, because like charges repel one another.
So all those black beads are gonna rise to the
top to the clear electrode the screen part which means

(10:12):
if you're looking down at the e reader, the screen
just turns black. Right, the white uh particles, the white
beads will all sink to the bottom because uh they're
positively charged and positive negative charges attract one another, so
they're all at the bottom. Now. The nice thing is,
once you've done that, it's set. It's going to be
like that until you change introduce another charge exactly so uh,

(10:36):
it's it's fantastic because that means you no longer have
to pour power into this device in order to have
whatever it is you've established. If you were to swap
the charges and suddenly make the electrode at the base
be a positively charged electrode, then it would repel all
the white beads. They would rise to the top, all
the black beads would come to the bottom, and you
would have a blank screen. That's what would look like

(10:56):
to you write. And by varying that across the entire
surface of the back pain, then you can have these
black people patterns and words and pictures and whatever you
want exactly. And depending upon how small those beads are,
you can have some pretty interesting some pretty good resolution.
So it's not like, you know, it's not like there's

(11:16):
only like ten beads in here. Now, there's millions of
the little things. So that's your basic premise with electrophoretic technology,
but they're not all uh, specifically in that implementation in
inc is that's the style of eating those those beads
are just a hundred microns, Why so a hundred thousand

(11:38):
can fit into one square inch of quote unquote paper. Uh,
so you're talking, like I said, millions of these things,
depending upon the size of your display. Obviously, larger displays
are going to need more beads nor to have that resolution.
But another variation of this uses something called micro cups. Microcups,
they're kind of what they sound like. They're little into

(12:00):
visually sealed cups of of of stuff. You've got a
bead in these and you also have um some some
dye in them. So the idea is that if you
pull the bead to the top towards the screen side,
you get a blank screen. When they're pulled down to
the base of the little individual micro cups of the

(12:22):
shows through and creates your color pattern. Yeah. So you
can think of each micro cup as an individual pixel
in this entire screen, and by pulling various beads down,
you create what are the words and the patterns and
the pictures and all that kind of stuff. Uh, same
basic principle, though you're just using electric charge to move
something around. In this case, it's just one bead instead

(12:45):
of different pairs of beads. So very interesting. These again
are the most popular I would say approaches. The micro
cups approaches supposedly better for flexible displays, just more effective.
It's easy to implement than the the you know, massive
number of beads approach. But that, if you know, that

(13:07):
was essentially the version we covered in the first tech
Stuff episode back in two thousand eight. So everything from
here on out is new and scary and possibly going
to make me uh fall over in attempts to pronounce
some of these words. So uh, I'm just just prepare yourself, folks.
You can you can do it. Jonathan coolisteric liquid crystal

(13:31):
display technology. Let's hit it all right. So liquid crystals,
those are pretty awesome. They can behave kind of like
a liquid and kind of like a solid. So solids,
their molecular structure is really stable right there in a
set pattern. They don't move around. They maintain their orientation
in respect to each other. Liquid is different. Those molecules

(13:53):
and a liquid can be all willing and they and
move around and they don't have to maintain their respective orientations.
So this is easy to imagine if you're thinking about
just the way water moves. All those little molecules are
moving all over the place inside that amount of water,
whereas if you're looking at a solid table at tables
not moving. It's not, at least not in respect to

(14:16):
you know, one part of the table is not moving
in respect to another part of the table, unless you've
got a really weird table. So liquid crystals can behave
like either solids or liquids, depending upon the situation. Now,
colosteric liquid crystals have stable phases, very important. You want
it to be able to set into a particular orientation

(14:36):
and maintain it. But um, because if it didn't, then
you couldn't use it for something like creating pictures and words.
It wouldn't be stable. It would just keep changing and
you might have a really cool piece of wal art,
but it wouldn't be useful or maybe only once very
very differently, right, kind of a million monkeys in a

(14:57):
room with typewriters kind of way. Yeah, So liquid crystals
in these displays, they form a helical structure also known
as a chiral structure, and depending upon their orientation, they
either reflect light or the absorb light. So by running
a current through a display with these crystals, you can
orient them in such a way that they form shapes
like words and pictures, and like electrophoretic displays, these are

(15:21):
the term is by stable. I think that we forgot
to mention that up there. By stable is what it
means when something can stick a certain way without having
to put an electric and until you put an electric
charge back through it. Right, So in other words, once
you have it set, it's good to go. This is
the same thing. Like I'm sure you've heard the argument
about people who before we were allowed to have electronic

(15:43):
devices on at takeoff and landing and people would say
you need to turn off your e reader devices. There
are folks who are saying, you know, this isn't it's
not assuming power unless they turn the page because it's
not producing any kind of radiation at all unless I
butt right, Yeah, it's yeah, exactly, as long as the
WiFi is not on, then it's not doing anything. Also,

(16:04):
mine doesn't even have an off switch. Yeah that's true.
Someone's like, all all you're doing by making me put
it away is denying need a pleasure of reading. Right, Yeah,
you're you're making me focus on one of the more
stressful moments of flight and uh and that's not doing
anyone any good. Um. Yeah, So like you were saying,
both of those implementations are the kind where you don't

(16:26):
constantly sit power. You only do it whenever you need
to change whatever the uh. The various orientations are whether
it's the beads in the electro boretic or it's the
liquid crystals in the callisteric. Okay, let's move on to
electra wedding. All right, this is the problem that elderly
robots have. It's a serious issue. I'm glad I'm not

(16:50):
the only person who thought immediately, yeah, that's something else.
I think it all depends. Oh, Jonathan, I'm a terrible person.
Electra wedding technology has nothing to do with that. And
for all those people who out there who hate my
sense of humor, I'm sorry, but I am twelve so
actually sorry, not sorry. I think it's what he means. Yeah,
I mean, yes, that's who I am. But electro wedding

(17:14):
technology actually, it's a really interesting approach. Again. Now we're
using electric electricity to change the shape of a confined
water slash oil interface. So you know, water and oil
they don't mix. We've got sayings about it, uh, And
you can try it at home. You can put some
water and some oil in a glass together and you'll

(17:36):
see they do not mix together. And if you were
to try and mix them together, they would separate. So
that's important. But when you have no voltage applied to
this particular type of display, the oil forms a film
between the water and an electrode the stream, which is hydrophobic. Now,
hydrophobic just means that water won't stick to it, right.

(17:57):
It's like if you've ever had any kind of rain
X or other film that you put on your windshield,
your car's windshield so that when you go out in
the rain, it just beats up and rolls off. Kind
of terminator one thousand style that is that is hydrophobics, hydrophobic.
Fancy word for a simple concept. Ye. So this uh,
this way of creating the oil, and on top of

(18:17):
this this water level that's what creates a colored pixel.
And applying a voltage makes the water push that oil aside,
which creates a transparent pixel. So if the oils on top,
you get something. You can get a color color, right,
whatever the color of the back pain is. Actually, so
if you had a blue back pain, you just see blue. Uh.

(18:40):
And then if you were to switch the water in place,
it would be a lighter color of blue because it
would be transparent more than opaque. The way you would
get a blank screen is if you had a white backplate.
You know, I think I've been saying back pain and
I think it might be because my chair is really weird,
but no, it's back plate. Um. But yeah, if the

(19:01):
backplate has a white surface, you get that transparency that's
seen as a blank screen. And uh, the neat thing
about this is that it's it responds faster than the
other versions we've talked about. So the ones we talked
about it previously, they're great for things like books, they're
not so great for video. I mean, you you can
find some of these e paper displays that use electrophorredic

(19:26):
technology that yeah, your your refresh rate has to be
pretty high to interpret it as as video. You might
be able to get something that plays like a simple
game of snake or something along those lines, but it
tends to be you know, pretty slow in response, slow
enough for us to detect, whereas, uh, the electro wedding
technology can move fast enough where we're not able to

(19:48):
notice the change. Um that way, you know, it's not
like there's a lag or delay that's noticeable to us.
So it moves fast enough where we could use it
to show video, and it also requires less energy than
your typical lc D display, So it's still one of
those that is suitable for that kind of thing without

(20:08):
you know, breaking the bank on your electric bill. It's
not by stable, however, because you do have to continuously
apply electricity to retain an image. So if you were
to remove the electric charge, the water would move out
the way again, the oil would come to the surface,
and you would just have uh, you know, a black
screen or whatever color the oil happened to be in

(20:29):
the and the back plate had happened to be. So yeah,
it's kind of interesting. Um. The only company I could
find that's actually working on this technology is called liquid Vista,
and it was a company that was spun off by Phillips.
Phillips had been doing the research into this and they
kind of said, well, it's not only gonna work for us,
but we will spin off, you know, kind of sell

(20:50):
off this this research division because there's there's potential for
that particular technology. And that was not a not a
pun potential with electricity, and are you sure it wasn't,
so it was a pun, I guess, So it was
an unintentional pun. Those are the best kind. Those are
basically the only kind that I make, and I'm a

(21:10):
little bit embarrassed every time. So how does this electroc
wedding differentiate itself from electro fluid I. That's a good
question that I did not understand at first. I had
to read a few different pieces to really understand electro
fluidic technology. Well, it uses liquid, as you would imagine
with fluid I. That does say that there's some sort

(21:31):
of fluid involved, but instead it's using a liquid pigment
and a polymer layer that has micro cavities in it.
So let's say that you are looking down at the screen.
That screen actually has lots and lots of teeny tiny
pin prick holes like microscopic level. So just when you
look at it just looks like a blank screen, doesn't

(21:52):
You don't actually notice the pin bricks. You can't pick
them out with your eye. No, no, you can't. And
so when you apply an elector charge it because of
the way micro fluid motion happens in the presence of
an electric field, the pigment will start to go through
those micro cavities and fill out some of the space

(22:13):
and become pixels within the display. Okay, So it sounds
at first, when you think about it, sounds like you're
looking down and you just see liquid bubbling up out
of a hole and slowly filling up the screen. That's
not exactly what is. Each of these little micro cavities
is self contained. So each of those tiny little holes
is allowing enough oil to come up or pigment to

(22:34):
come up, to combine with the other ones in that
immediate area to make the edge of an letter E
for example. Sure. Sure, I didn't look into this one personally,
but I know that the way that some materials interact
with fluids involves a process called absorption, which basically means
that electrically speaking, they're kind of sticking to the edges

(22:54):
of it. And I suspect that that is what is
going on here from what I understand. Yes, we're getting,
by the way, into levels of physics that I never
explored in college or in in high school. This is
a heavy physics stay for us. Yeah, micro fluid I
physics is complicated stuff. Uh. And and we should also
mention that this particular implementation is something that some companies

(23:17):
are looking into, but it's not necessarily something you're gonna
find in a lot of products right now, whether you're
talking consumer or commercial. But it is an interesting approach,
and prototypes have all been in black and white as
far as I can tell, but the manufacturers say that
they would be able to make color versions as well,
so that you could have based upon the level of

(23:38):
voltage applied, different colors of pigment come up, and so
you could have a full color image on your e reader,
which is one of those things that people have wondered
about for a while. I mean, you can you can
get that if you have a back lit one. That's
pretty easy, certainly, or if you have independent multiple layers
of different colors of monochrome, right you could do it

(23:59):
that way. And of course these layers are so thin
that to us it would all appear as if it's
on the same plane. But technically you were able to
get shrink really down to the micro size. You could
tell they were on separate kind of floors if you
think about it, if you think of it, or or
layers in a sandwich, since we're talking about electrodes being
kind of like or cake in this case a mini

(24:20):
layered cake as only hypothetical that's true, which you know,
that's it's not the best kind of cake, but it's
better than the cake being alive. Um. Now, those displays,
the in particular, the these electro fluidic displays have a
high reflectivity, higher in fact than the other ones we've
talked about, and potentially, according again to manufacturers, that reflectivity

(24:44):
could reach the point where it's the same as paper.
So while we talk about e readers and the paper
having high reflectivity so it's like a piece of paper,
most of them don't come close to having the same
reflectivity as an actual piece of paper. They're just better
than say, a backlet display. From why I understand, this
particular implementation sounds like it would be the closest we

(25:07):
would get to having, you know, a one to one
correlation between paper and the paper as far as reflectivity
is concerned. So that means it would have the best
visibility in bright light. Um uh. And we'll talk more
about reflectivity a little bit later. We certainly will that
we have electrochromic technology. This one's also really cool. I

(25:28):
had no clue how many different versions of the paper
there really were. Yeah, So so far we've been talking
about two basic sides of a coin of the paper,
A vertical orientation of of bringing something to or away
from a surface in order to make color, or a
horizontal orientation of pushing stuff around inside the surface in

(25:50):
order to make it go. This is uh, this is
a chemical reaction. Yeah, electrochemical reactions. So some materials will
change color as they undergo reduction or oxidat So you
can think of it this in a in a sense
like iron as it rusts turns red, right, I mean
that's the way fresh round. Yeah, So that's one way
of looking at this. But these particular materials which have

(26:13):
names that are far too complex and too long for
me to even pronounce, so I didn't even bother to
put them into the notes. I just at that point
I was like, nope. But the color change in this
case is completely reversible for these particular types of materials
when they undergo oxidization. You can just control it through
applying an electrical charge. So if you send an electrical

(26:36):
charge to it, it will change color, and you send
a different electrical charge to it, it it changes back. Also,
the change in color is stable until another charge is applied,
so it's again a bistable display. So you you turn
the page, it would send the charge out to the
right parts of the screen to either have it switch,

(26:59):
or if it didn't need to switch, there'll be no
charge sent there. So like if there's a particular pixel
that needs to retain its color, it just won't get
a charge. Then everything else will get the charge swap
the way it needs to swap, and then you're good
until you need to change the page again. And this
kind of technology is is also being implemented in other ways,
isn't it absolutely? In fact, you can you can buy

(27:22):
stuff that has this technology in it right now. So
if you've ever heard about smart windows, windows that can
actually change their tent depending upon your demands, So yeah,
at your will, not like not like sunglasses that have
the color change film, right, Yeah, it's not that, not
that transition lens kind of technology, which is more of
a yeah, that's something where you know you're not even

(27:43):
part of the equation. No, I'm talking about Let's say
that you've got a dimmer switch for your window where
you can actually change the opacity of your window, um dynamically,
you can make it darker or lighter as you will.
So that sort of technology tends to have this approach,
This implementation in it where you change the electric charge

(28:05):
by flipping a switch or turning a dimmer and then
it ends up either making it darker or lighter, depending
upon whatever it is you told it to do. So
pretty cool stuff. Now you might think that we're through.
We are far from through. Here we go. We will
never be through interferometric modulator displays. And I know, the

(28:26):
longer I go, the more it sounds like I'm making stuff.
I promise I'm not making stuff up. These displays create
colors using interference of reflected light. So they're not even
using any kind of beads or anything like that. They're
specifically reflecting specific types of light to your eyeballs so

(28:48):
that you can see whatever it is that it's you're
supposed to see. So, so this is going to be
a series of mirrors inside the screen that are going
to be reflecting light in different ways. Essentially, that's what
you're talking about. It's a reflective surface. You might as
well call it a mirror because that's the that's the
easiest way of explaining it. But imagine that you have

(29:09):
a mirror that can only reflect a certain hue of
light in particular wavelength. Yeah, so let's say it's blue.
And when you look in that mirror, everything that you see,
even though it's a reflection of what what is in
front of you, is going to be blue, and the
rest of the wavelengths are being absorbed and that blue
stuff is being shot back out. Yeah, so you can
see yourself if you were smurf and everything in in

(29:32):
in your world was smurfy, because it would all be blue.
But I don't think I want that world, probably not.
But so you could have a monochromatic display, which would
mean that all the mirrors would reflect a specific color
and that would be the only color that would show
up whenever you were uh sending a charge through. Or

(29:53):
you can have a multicolor display, which would have multiple
little mirrors for each pixel. You would call them sub pixels.
So to create any individual color, you might have just
certain types of the mirrors showing, or maybe pairs of
the mirrors, because it would be kind of like a
color display, you know where you have that uh the

(30:14):
either the red, green, blue or the cyan magenta. You
know that that approach um. So you would have all
those little subpixels to make that multicolor display, and you
only would need to the to change the orientation of
the mirrors and use power for that. So again, once
you turn to page, once the mirrors are in the
right orientation, yeah, then all it's doing is just reflecting

(30:37):
light to you. So you just have light hitting that screen,
it reflects back and it's fine. When you turn the page,
then it changes the orientation of those mirrors, whether it's
pointing different ones at you so you can see different colors,
or they just turn so that it's hitting the backspace
backplate and you're getting a blank page that way, whatever
that happens to be, that's when it would consume power.

(30:58):
So again, very much a bistable approach. Really interesting stuff
obviously wouldn't be good for video. You're talking about changing
the orientation of all these reflective surfaces each time you
turn the page. It's probably not the fastest implementation I
would not imagine. So Okay, so we've talked about all
of this great stuff. I have to imagine that our

(31:22):
dear magical friend nanotechnology has to be involved in one
of these. It butts its head into things, sooner or later. Yes,
nanotech comes in the form of photonic crystal technology. This
is fairly recent as far as the different implementations go
and photonic crystals are nanostructures that are arranged in a
regular pattern. So imagine that you've got like a block

(31:44):
of these things and they're all each one is made
up of an individual little sphere. And when you change
the shape of that that block of spheres, like you
stretch it out, or you compress it down, or you
just move it in some way, the allor changes. So
if you are able to say, uh, implant these nanostructures

(32:07):
into a polymer, a stretchable polymer, and then when you
apply electricity two said polymer, the polymer changes shape, which
by its very nature, because you have these nano structures
implanted in the polymer, it means the shape of that
that polymer pattern is going to change. That changes the
way light reflects off of it. It creates the pictures

(32:28):
that you want to stay. Yeah, so uh yeah, if
you think of it, like if you were to imagine
maybe a sheet of rubber and you have a bunch
of marbles that are that are like embedded in that
sheet of rubber, and you pull the rubber tight so
that you see that the marble start to move away
from each other. That's kind of what we're talking about,

(32:49):
but on the nanoscale, and remember a nanometer is one
billion of a meter. We're talking super super small here,
so it's not something you would ever be able to observe,
not even a light microscope depending upon the size of
these these particular structures, so teeny tiny stuff. And it
does have some current drawbacks, which is that one, if

(33:11):
you are looking at trying to create color display, the
contrast between colors isn't very strong, so your pictures don't
tend to be very clearly vibrant. Yeah. Uh, there are
from what I understand, top men working on it right now. Uh,
top men, And anything involving nanotechnology also is usually on

(33:33):
the expensive end. Yes, And it's it's definitely, you know,
one of those things where you've got several research groups
looking into the feasibility of this approach and whether or
not it makes more sense. I mean, we have all
these different options right now. It can be that maybe
in twenty years time most of these fade away as

(33:55):
we start to see which ones make the most sense,
whether economically or you know, whichever one gives the best experience.
That sort of thing is really going to determine which
of these stick around, and there may be some of
these that are really good for very specific and implementations
everything else. All right, Our last one on the list

(34:15):
is one that I am incredibly fascinated by. It's called
read or reverse emulsion electrophoretic display technology. Yeah, this is neat,
neat stuff. Okay, you've got two different types of liquid
in one display. In this case, you've got a base
liquid that is nonpolarized right into the words normal old material.
You're not going to have it react to an electric charge.

(34:38):
Then you have a polarized dyed liquid. So imagine that
you've got like a giant beaker filled with clear liquid.
We'll just say it's it's it's some sort of like
water like stuff. It's it's perfectly neutral, so it's not
going to react to electricity. Um. But then you put
in it this bluish dye and it's got a polar

(35:00):
Ei element to it, and you mix it up really
good so that maybe there's a light bluish tinge to
the water, but otherwise you can't. You can't. But then
when you apply an electric charge, you can gather all
that blue dye into a specific spot and it will
suddenly look like it's coalescing into almost a solid object

(35:22):
within this liquid. Yeah. So if you were to do
that in a display format where you have a very
controlled environment, so it's not again, it's not like a
dish that just has all this liquid in it. It's
in very specific locations. You could actually create the electric
charge so that the die coalesces exactly where you want

(35:45):
it to and it becomes an electronic piece of paper.
This this is the one that sounds like two. Yeah.
I think of this as as if you were able
to write on a sheet of paper and then see
all the words suddenly gloam up into a ball of
ink in the center of the page and then become
new words across the page. It's very sort of Terry

(36:08):
gilliam esque kind of image in my head. Uh, that's
sort of what this thing can do, except of course,
it's doing it electronically. It's not physically altering the the
actual INC. Uh No, And this one is really extra
super new. Yeah. Yeah, this is one of those that
again is uh there's actually a company that's just working
on trying to develop the INC. It's not even going

(36:30):
to be developing a display for this INC. So we
are we are at least a couple of years away
from seeing this working in any kind of implementation, apart
from maybe some really early prototypes. But it's just it's
it's cool to see all the different things we can
do with just playing with electricity and creating this same

(36:53):
sort of effect through very different implementations. I just I
think it's fascinating that people can take the same basic
uh concept. Yeah, the end goal is the same, and
ultimately the thing that makes everything change electricity is the same,
but everything in between those two points is totally different,

(37:13):
so different. Yeah, and it's fascinating to me, especially because
it's such a material's heavy based technology, and you know,
as we get better materials and as our manufacturing process
is improved, we're going to see huge improvements in this
kind of um. You know, a lot of what is
going to be involved is coming up with stuff that

(37:33):
has really non reflective films, you know, screens and very
very reflective materials creating the pixels inside those screens. Right,
So what you're saying is that the the surface isn't reflective,
because otherwise you would just be it would be like
holding a mirror and shining light in your eyes. But
that the the ink itself, whatever you want to call

(37:55):
that inc whether it's little solid particles or fluid, whatever
it is, that would need to be the super reflective
stuff so that you have a nice sharp contrast. Yes,
the less reflective the material of film and the more
reflective the material of the pixels, the sharper the image
overall will be UM. Luckily, this kind of idea applies

(38:16):
to other fields as well that are also very lucrative.
For example, in solar panels. Solar panels are super super
effective when a lot of light gets through the panel's surface.
Perhaps obviously if the light is reflecting off the whatever
protective layers on the top of the panel, then you're
losing that light cannot capture that and and convert it

(38:37):
to electricity. Right, So people are working on creating materials
that have very low reflection. We talked over on our
other show Forward Thinking UM with Joe. We did an
episode on biomimicry, and it featured some of the anti
reflective stuff that people are doing based on moth size um,
which happened to be covered in this nanostructure that kind

(38:57):
of just funnels photons straight through UM that also happened
to be called corneal nipple displays, which I think is
my favorite science term of the year. I can't I
can't say it without giggling. They're they're little, they're the well,
I mean it's it's for their little conical shapes. So
I mean it makes perfect sense. You know, you call it,
call it as you see it. Um that that episode,

(39:18):
by the way, if you would like to listen to it,
is called bio Mimetics and it published on June. Yeah,
if you're not listening to Forward Thinking, if you're a
fan of tech stuff, you'd be a fan of Forward Thinking,
trust us absolutely. And in addition to helping out with
the contrast of these screens, getting these light efficiencies worked

(39:40):
out would also help allow for multi color e paper.
Like I said, you know, one of those ways to
do it involves having multiple transparent layers of different colors
and so so you would have like a red layer,
a green layer, a blue layer, a black layer, and
then through combining those, depending upon what the commands were
from the elect shrodes, you would be able to create

(40:01):
a full color display. Uh. Again, if we're if we're
talking about electro for for reddic then it would be uh,
it would be great for full color illustrations for things
like science textbooks that kind of thing. Comic books or
comic books as another great example. Yeah, if you are
getting comic books on an e reader, then you probably
want to have full color because you can't really appreciate

(40:23):
the artwork if it if it's if it's not a
black and white comic, you're not able to fully appreciate
all the work that went into generating it. Oh sure.
Also just on an industrial level, I mean, in order
to bring the paper into the same realm as regular
old printed paper. You know, the entire color industry is
is a really huge part of all of that. Advertisers

(40:44):
you know, uh, Coke wants to use Coca Cola red,
Ninja Turtles want to use Ninja turtle green, like like,
everyone has very specific copyrighted colors that go along with
their stuff. And until you allow people to make honestly advertisements, um,
the same way that they would on print paper, it's
never gonna take its place. Yeah. Yeah, well, so I
know that we've talked in the past on tech stuff

(41:06):
about the the idea of the paperless office. But yeah,
until you're able to get into something like that where
you're able to get really good color matching, it just
isn't gonna happen. Um, And uh, you know, I don't
know about you, Lauren, but I every every year it
seems like I I a crew more paper, not less so.

(41:26):
But anyway, yeah, it's interesting to talk about this technology.
I mean, obviously it's something that is becoming more and
more popular. I mean the Kindle, Yeah, I love, I
love all my kindles. Um, actually I need to get
I need to get a new one, in fact, because

(41:46):
my I busted my old one. You know. Yeah, what
can I say? You read George rr Martin, You're bound
to throw a book against the wall, and the book
happens to be a like tronic you pay for it.
So anyway, yeah, these are these It's a really cool technology.
It's really one of those that was cutting edge and

(42:09):
no one had heard about it just a few years ago. Really,
and now everyone knows about it, but not everyone knows
what makes it tick. Why do you have this thing
where the only time it sets powers when you turn
a page? And I think it's really interesting to explore
the technology that makes it possible. So Danny, I want
to thank you for sending in that suggestion, and if

(42:31):
any of you have suggestions for future episodes of tech
stuff then you can write us an email tech Stuff
at how stuff works dot com. It is actually working now.
It is weekend, completely confirmed, it is in fact working.
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uh tech stuff hs wsr handle. It's the same handle
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(42:53):
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