E Ink Gives Architects a Kind of E-Paint

Many people know E Ink for providing technology that creates the text in e-readers like Amazon.com 's Kindle. Now the Taiwan-based company is moving beyond displays for authors to the world of architects.

E Ink is using the Consumer Electronics Show to launch Prism, a new application of its technology to decorate company walls, commercial exhibits, airport terminals and other spaces. Think of flat, sign-like surfaces composed of a collection of polygons or other shapes. Those shapes can individually switch on to show colors, creating shifting patterns that are a bit like a simple abstract painting.

Giovanni Mancini, the companys director of product management, compares the applications to paint. When decorating a wall the old-fashioned way, he says, people choose their colors, apply the paint and the effect remains static for a long period of time.

With Prism, the colors can be dynamic, changing at random, due to conscious programming or external stimuli. What E Ink is doing is taking pigments and controlling those pigments, Mancini says.

Digital display technology, of course, is much more dynamic. But it also consumes much more power. Prism benefits from the same advantage that makes E Ink a popular choice for e-readers: Power is only consumed when a page turnsor, in this case, when colors change on a wall.

Promoting Prism will be a different kind of task for the company. Instead of reaching out to dozens of hardware companies, E Ink will be trying to attract thousands of architects, designers and other professionals. Mancini says the response has been good so far. Theres a lot of interest, he says.

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E Ink Gives Architects a Kind of E-Paint