Guy Kewney

One of the remarkable things about future display technologies will be their ability to run on absolutely no power whatsoever. The e-paper revolution will, however, challenge our ideas of how user interfaces are designed.

The problem, simply summarised, is that bi-stable electronics ­which allow the image on an e-book reader to stay “lit up” for months, or even years, without power ­ mean that e-books are also pretty bad at rapid updates.

The obvious application needing rapid screen updates is video. And full-screen, high-definition (HD), million-colour video is definitely here. And people are already taking it for granted, somewhat. But the availability of HD video makes
some pretty sweeping assumptions about what it actually costs.

Video, in short, is cheap, at all levels except one; and it’s useful at one level that people tend not to consider. The level where it becomes prohibitive is in battery power; and the area where we tend to assume it will be available, is in the menus and pointers of modern user interfaces. It is one of those “oops…” items.

I have just completed an update on a massive e-paper report, and it is fair to say that the one question our survey exposed as really heavy on “oops…” qualities was: “What alternative to ‘window, icon, menu, pointer’ (WIMP) would you expect to implement on displays that do not refresh quickly?”

The problem is obvious when you consider the modern Mac and Vista screens. They are utterly profligate with their expenditure of screen acceleration and polygon manipulations. And with iPhone and iTouch and Picsel all leading the fashion for similarly flashy graphics on portables, users are starting to take it for granted that they will be able to have this hyperactivity on any modern IT device.

But it will not happen at all for e-paper for the next half decade, maybe longer. All e-paper displays will need to be available in versions that use low-power “passive matrix” technologies that will allow them to run for days, maybe even weeks, without recharging batteries.

Look at a simple Windows XP display. Every time you hit the “Alt” key, the display changes the menu options. Every time you touch the mouse, a little arrow scampers around the screen. The menu pull-downs, the window re-sizing, the scrolling, zooming and text-reflow operations when editing ­ all require not just one, but several complete re-draws of the screen. Each redraw uses battery power. On a games box or PC that is plugged into the mains, that’s fine. On a DVD box or laptop that doesn’t have to run more than four or five hours, who cares? After all, most of their power drain comes from the backlighting, anyway.

But on an e-book that needs to be relied on out in the field and which has a display using ambient light (no backlit technology needed) using WIMP technology is as daft as unplugging the server to plug in your espresso maker.

Right now, there are no serious applications for e-paper, and no mass market. But our report makes it clear that the market generated by these new-generation displays will be disruptive. At least, it can be ­ if someone comes up with a way of interfacing between them and the user.

Solutions will appear. After all, there have been great examples of quite simple mono-LCD operating environments in, for instance, early Palm Pilot models and Handspring look-alikes. They had terrific battery life that allowed people to use them for days without a recharge.

But then again, it would be a brave marketing boss who said to the backers, “It’s okay. We’ll go back to good, old-fashioned static virtues,” in today’s animation-addicted world.

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