We never quite know what shape technology will take. Take electronic paper. Now under development by several companies, the notion is to produce a flexible display page that mimics paper, but can be loaded with changing information. Think of a multipage device that looks pretty much like a newspaper, but one that wirelessly updates its content every morning. With this newspaper, the pages themselves are the display surface, housing digital text.

If the goal is cool technology, this flexible paper surely ranks high on a list of interesting ideas. But companies such as Gyricon Media, which grew out of work at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, and E-Ink (whose parentage includes MIT's Media Lab) have more in mind than proving the concept. Their innovations may ultimately spin off into display technologies that make reading content on many kinds of computer screens easier on the eyes.

Here's the basic idea behind Gyricon's so-called "SmartPaper," which began its development 20 years ago at Xerox's Palo Alto facility (PARC). Imagine a transparent plastic sheet filled with tiny beads. Each of these beads is half white, half black, and the two halves of each bead contain an opposing electrical charge. You can now apply an electric field that will rotate the beads to produce an image. The name Gyricon is, in fact, a way of saying "revolving image" in Greek, and that's what this paper does; it twists its media to produce the picture.

According to Gyricon's Web site (http://www.gyriconmedia.com), SmartPaper can be produced in a roll, like newsprint. Each plastic sheet holds literally millions of these beads inside; the Gyricon site shows a researcher holding them in his hand like grains of sand. Unlike other digital devices, SmartPaper holds its image until changed by another electric charge, which can be applied by electrodes or a stylus. Its viewing angle is wide and what's "printed" on it is immune to fading.

You can't buy a newspaper made out of SmartPaper yet, but Gyricon Media is testing its technology in the form of signs in retail stores. Its wireless, battery-driven signs display changeable text and graphics and are completely programmable, so merchants can make changes on the fly. Current resolution limits are 100 dots per inch, but resolutions of 300 dpi are in sight, with the goal of developing 1,200-dpi displays as crisp as print on paper.

Both Gyricon Media and Cambridge, Ma.-based E-Ink (http://www.eink.com) seem to be moving in the same direction, marketing point-of-sale signs in retail stores as a test for later developments in handheld computer displays, as well as electronic books. E-Ink uses transparent capsules instead of beads, each containing dyes and white particles that react to the presence of an electrical field. The company introduced its first store signs in 1999, testing them in J.C. Penney stores and a variety of other outlets.

But the real growth area is in the direction of high-resolution displays for computer devices, as shown by E-Ink's recent deal with Philips. The Dutch electronics giant will manufacture displays for handheld computers and electronic books using core E-Ink technologies in return for a $7.5 million investment in the company. Expect these displays in monochrome format some time in 2003, with color to follow soon after. E-Ink demonstrated a $300 e-book device using this display at a recent conference in Washington. The 7-inch screen ran on two AA batteries.

This e-book prototype has a single screen, but E-Ink founder Joseph Jacobson has painted a picture of the company's ultimate goal -- a "book" made of hundreds of pages of electronic paper that, with sufficient memory, could hold tens of thousands of books inside. It's an interesting concept, because it raises the question of format. If you can make a device that mimics a book, should you? Or is it better to abandon the book's current shape in favor of a display better suited to the new medium?

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