Future Watch

August 1997 / Bits / Future Watch

Digital Ink Gives New Meaning to Paper Recycling
Chris Chinnock
Imagine that, instead of tossing your newspaper into the recycling bin, you keep the paper and rewrite the next day's news onto the same piece of paper. While such a dream is still years awa y, researchers at the MIT Media Lab are working on a process that could someday do just that.
With the technology's current state of development, you have to feed each sheet through a modified ink-jet printer to erase the old text and print new text. But this is an interim step toward a matrix-addressable paper. Ultimately, each sheet might have its own processor or a wireless receiver to facilitate updating.
What makes all this possible is a special ink that contains tiny microencapsulated electrophoretic particles. When voltage is appli ed, the particles are drawn to one side and appear white. When attracted to the opposite side, they flip and appear dark. The resulting display has good contrast, consumes very little power, and has a wide viewing angle-just like paper.

Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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