Thesis 62

The necessary display technologies already exist.

Although many—perhaps even the majority of—deployments of everyware will by their nature not require display screens of the conventional sort, there will still be a general requirement for the graphic presentation of information.

With displays of various sorts appearing in an ever greater number of places throughout the environment, though, we can assume that the ethic of calmness we've discussed in other contexts will also inform their design. And this turns out to have a lot to do with screen luminance and resolution, threshold values of which must be reached before the display itself fades from awareness—before, that is, you feel like you're simply working on a document and not on a representation of a document.

With the commercial introduction of Sony's LIBRIÉ e-book reader in early 2004, display screens would appear to have effectively surmounted the perceptual hurdles associated with such transparency of experience: In reading text on them, you're no more conscious of the fact that you're using a screen than you would ordinarily be aware that you're reading words from a printed page.

The LIBRIÉ, a collaboration of Sony, Philips Electronics' Emerging Display Technology unit, and startup E Ink, is a relatively low-cost, mass-market product. At 170 pixels per inch, the screen's resolution is not heroically high by contemporary standards—Mac OS defaults to 72 ppi for displaying graphics on monitors, Windows to 96—but text rendered on it "looks like a newspaper" and has left a strongly favorable impression on most of us lucky enough to have seen it.^*

^* If Sony had chosen not to cripple the LIBRIÉ with unreasonably restrictive content and rights-management policies, it's very likely that you, too, would have seen the device. As it is, Sony's regrettable distrust of its own customers has ensured that an otherwise-appealing product ends up atop the dustbin of history.

The LIBRIÉ owes much of its oooooh factor to E Ink's proprietary microencapsulation technology—a technology which, it must be said, is impressive in many regards. The quality that leaps out at someone encountering it for the first time is its dimensionality. The technique allows conformal screens of so-called "electronic paper" to be printed to the required specifications, and this can result in some striking applications, like the rather futuristic watch prototype the company has produced in collaboration with Seiko, a gently curving arc a few millimeters thick. But it's also versatile—large-scale prototype displays have been produced—and astonishingly vibrant, and it's easy to imagine such units replacing conventional displays in the widest possible variety of applications.^**

^** None of this is to neglect that other common trope of ubicomp imaginings, the wall- or even building-scale display. A friend once proposed, in this regard, that the Empire State Building be lit each night with a display of color tuned to function as a thermometer—a kind of giant ambient weather beacon.

Nor is E Ink the only party pursuing next-generation displays. Siemens offers a vanishingly thin "electrochromic" display potentially suitable for being printed on cardboard, foil, plastic and paper. These are being envisioned, initially at least, for limited-lifetime applications such as packaging, labels, and tickets; when combined with printable batteries such as those produced by Israeli startup Power Paper, the Minority

Report scenario of yammering, full-motion cereal boxes is that much closer to reality.

Commercial products using the E Ink technology, including the Seiko watch, are slated for introduction during 2006; Siemens, meanwhile, plans to introduce 80-dpi electrochromic packaging labels (at a unit cost of around 30 cents) during 2007. The inference we can draw from such developments is that the challenges posed by a general requirement for highly legible ambient display are well on their way to being resolved, at a variety of scales. As a consequence, we can regard the issue of display as posing no further obstacle to the development of ubiquitous systems requiring them.