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Comment by boyter | Hacker News Reader

I have always wanted a large one (24" or more) to display whatever painting I find interesting on that day. I went looking several months ago without any luck. These look like they would be perfect for my use case.

I find the idea of having whatever art piece I want on the wall very appealing.

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I've wanted to do this but have the art undergo a very subtle or slow animation. Like have the clock on the wall in the painting tell real time, or leaves very slowly flutter in the breeze.

Or, with the aid of a bit of gaze tracking, have the eyes subtly follow you around. Or an element of the picture that's always where you aren't looking, and flits from place to place while your eye saccades...

Use gaze tracking to have it change when nobody's looking at it. It's a different picture now and then but you'll never catch it changing no matter how long you watch.

Here is an amazing blog post where someone did exactly this!

https://www.claybavor.com/?p=407

Obviously they took a pretty expensive and power intensive route, but the end result is absolutely phenomenal

I think all these ideas will be best realized when we can have entire walls made of programmable, maybe electro-organic with properties like chameleon skin, material that can be set to display anything we want.

Go one step further and it can be even better; have them also emit air with different temperatures and smells, so that I can have one wall displaying an open field, for example, complete with the feeling of a fresh scented breeze coming from that direction.

Ray Bradbury anticipated such a total immersive experience in his book Fahrenheit 451.

He was not so sanguine about it, as he saw it as a potential pitfall which could lead people to lose their humanity in a cloud of vague emotions and indistinct narratives. It would be more pernicious than a sensory deprivation chamber because the total immersion would lull its users into a state of unfocused, passive complacency. By contrast, wrestling with a worthwhile book would sharpen the mind and will by making the reader aspire to meet the standards of the text.

More interesting is the moment when this future is more evenly distributed and the technology is so cheap that we have animated decorations on toilet paper.

IoT Toilet paper that can match your stains into something like images from a search engine and turn it in to a picture....... With gaze tracking

And then make it display statues of weeping angels.

Don't blink!

I'm pretty sure this comment chain is going to end up making someone a lot of money.

Honestly, I love the idea of a van Goph with a massive, subtly moving image.

The new movie of Van Gogh is just that.

http://bengrosser.com/projects/protocols-of-looking/ -- artwork w gaze tracking, looks away when you look at it

And this is how schizophrenia gets triggered.

Silicon Dawn generation 2? ;-P

Wait until this can be embedded in cards powered by what light they can absorb and, I dunno, the kinetic energy of shuffling them. "Hey wait last time I looked at this card her eyes were closed..."

I was fed-up with the poor quality of display frames available commercially, so I built my own. Asus display (stripped), custom distressed-look vintage frame from Etsy, AppleTV, custom matte and mount and this is the result https://www.dropbox.com/s/n0kmwfd00kot6mu/File%20May%2024%2C... I am quite happy with the result and plan on making a larger one for high-res art display.

Nice. Of course, with E-Ink you could run the whole thing off batteries instead of having that cable.

For now, instead of plastering the cable in, you could put up a picture rail and hide the cable inside that.

Hah, I got you all beat. I want an entire wall to be a display. I can set it to have wallpaper (!) of any sort. People can hike the continental divide with a gopro on their head, and I can have the wall display be the resulting video. It would be quite awesome!

Can you imagine? If you had your wall papered in e-ink panels you could have localised control too, cast something to one in particular or put up all your holiday photos, one after the other.

Would not be pleasant when your whole room is flashing though.

I'm actually a bit surprised that there aren't gopro videos of spectacular hikes that go real time step-by-step from start to finish, that one could use as wallpaper. Wouldn't you want to get one from, let's say, climbing Everest? Or mount one on the nose of a locomotive and film a coast-to-coast train journey?

Not GoPro, but Norwegian broadcaster NRK have filmed several train journeys as part of their "slow tv" offering. Original HD video files (200++ GB) are available [0], and there are multiple versions on Youtube, like a 10 hour trip with Nordlandsbanen from Trondheim to Bodø [1] and a 7 hour trip from Bergen to Oslo [2], including a 10 minute stretch from Finse where the scenes from Hoth in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back were filmed [3].

[0] https://nrkbeta.no/2009/12/18/bergensbanen-eng/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=831Drz4YQdQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR15x_ujuPA

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql2qXpNVTjw

You can find more videos via searching for the phrase "minutt for minutt" on YouTube.

Those are awesome, and just what I'm talking about. If only there was a wall display!

The video that actually inspired me to go find and hike El Caminito del Rey (back before they renovated it and reopened it)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmDhRvvs5Xw

A friend of mine has brought this to spin class: Scenic cycle - http://sceniccycle.com/

He drove and recorded all the footage himself then opened his studio!

Experienced the projection version of this in an art gallery[1], speaking of flashing.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/BEoV6w_C4XK/

Weren't whole-wall displays a plot point in Farenheit 451?

Whole wall displays do appear in scifi movies, it's not remotely a new idea. But the long form travelogues may be relatively new. People take tons of photos and videos of Everest, but as far as I know nobody has done a step-by-step video, or has even occurred to anyone to do so.

That has been already described in 1953: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

Bah, a wall? VR with 360 camera playback speed tied to treadmill or stationary bike I'm on.

I like the cut of your jib.

Couldn't you do this now with a projector?

I have a projector (and I love it) that displays on most of a wall in the basement. It's perfect for watching a movie. For wallpaper, not so much. The room has to be completely dark, the projector makes noise, consumes lots of power, and has a short lamp life.

Funny that this is what you guys wanted it for.

I swear, I have been wanting this SO BAD for so long for my monitor. LCDs are bright and make my eyes hurt. I want this for my monitor.

The latency would make it tough for anything other than word processing (and even that would be a bit annoying).

The Kindle display can do latencies of <100ms if they're set to plain black and white --- the really slow refreshes are due to hacking it to make it do greyscale. I think that's comparable to the old greenscreen monitors, but I can't find any hard figures. Would certainly be worth a try.

What I would really like, however, is a monitor-sized Sharp Memory LCD display, as made famous by the Pebble. The colour displays are things of beauty. The colour gamut's not brilliant, but they refresh instantly, consume practically no power, and look great. With the backlight turned off, you get an interesting metallic sheen that looks like no other display on earth.

Even the monochrome ones are really cool. I have a development kit where the display can show white and silver --- like, metallic, reflective silver, which you can (just about) see your face in.

Alas, they don't make them much bigger than watch sized.

I've seen demonstrations of eink displays showing 60fps video without any noticeable latency. I think the latency is purely dependent on the voltages used to drive the display.

Edit: This was with a black and white display. Depending on how the colour displays work, avoiding latency might not be possible as easily.

Can you give links where?

We wanted to make eink displays with touchscreen controls for videoconferencing but the latency isnt great.

Qualcomm's Mirasol displays might have fit the bill, they weren't responding to my company's request for samples and they eventually closed everything down without shipping many (any?) in production. They are working on a MEMS-IGZO product w Sharp that was similar and supposed to come out last year but I haven't heard a peep recently. Liquavista was working on a color epaper solution as well (acquired by Samsung in 2010, then Amazon in 2013, nothing announced.)

Qualcomm shutdown Mirasol in 2012 after buying it back in 2004 and laid off all the engineers. http://gizmodo.com/5928315/say-goodbye-to-qualcomms-magic-mi...

Recently, Apple bought the Taiwan fab plant where the old mirasol displays were made, which had been transferred to AU Optronics. But a fab is a fab is a fab so it doesn't mean they're making mirasol displays there.

Liquavista is another crapshoot, spun off in 2006, made huge pronouncements at shows, told us they would be production ready in 8-12 months back in 2010 and then shuttered in Dec 2010. Then layoffs, then Samsung, now Amazon. No clue what their real status is now.

In other words, doing demos is doing demos. Commercially available production ready product is a different story completely.

Mirasol made it into the Qualcomm Toq smartwatch, but in ‘limited quantities’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Toq

Mirasol also made it to an e-reader, but I believe it was only released in South Korea.

http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/kyobo-mirasol-color-e-reader-deb...

I've heard with 60fps refresh, the power efficiency goes away.

That's more than enough for me. I get home from coding and I want to work on my novel, but LCDs are killing my eyes.

Try a pen and paper. Worked for so many for so long. This pen with broad italic Masuyama nibs, some fine ink. Watch out, fountain pens are like cats. You cannot stop at one.

http://www.franklin-christoph.com/model-20-marietta.html

Ha, I have a problem with stationery. I'll buy beautiful pens and notebooks, but I never end up writing with them. Or I'll just get carried away with how pretty the ink looks on the page, and copy out poetry or my own signature. For actual writing I need to type.

Starting is hard. Do a diary and see where that takes you. Don't buy expensive stuff first. A simple lined notebook and a cheap fountain pen. I found myself buying things for hobbies, spending money but not time and effort. Nowadays, if anything, I buy books and study. When I have the habits in place, i'll learn how to paint.

If you're afraid of making that first entry in your beautiful new notebook, turn it upside down, flip it around and make a few trivial entries or notes in the back of the notebook. Once it's no longer blank, using the notebook for its intended purpose will be a lot easier.

Not speaking for parent, but I have terrible handwriting :(

Then try calligraphy. All it takes is practice. Like playing the piano, or coding.

Apparently this can be done. Not too surprising.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/259582/how_to_use_a_kindle_dx...

Yep that's true.

But I will put up with that -- the "good" of it being easy on the eyes trumps the "bad" of latency issues.

Though, let's hope the technology matures and this problem is solved to some extent.

Having tried the Kindle expiremental browser, I can confirm. Granted their tech may be more primitive than this!

By the way, Dasung Paperlike, the monochrome e-ink display is now on Indiegogo. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-world-s-first-e...

Dasung is very cool for a text terminal. But last time I asked they required weird drivers, not available for Linux of course.

to be honest I am awaiting the day I can just cover an entire wall in them so I can be outdoors all the time

Absolutely! I would put up with a fair amount of latency just to have this. I'm picturing late-night work with a lamp in front of my monitor (not kidding). And it would probably do wonders for a laptop's battery, right?

Did you see the video link posted here [1]? "Latency" seems to be in the 5-10s range with a huge amount of jarring flickering. Definitely not bad as an art display but way way way far from being remotely useable as a screen. Considering how long this step took, still easily 3-5yrs or more from a commercially viable monitor.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767090

Still wondering why Pixel Qi failed. It's the one piece of tech in the past decade I keep going back to. The founders went off to Google X and the patents were snatched up by the EFF co-founder and openly licensed in the past year.

It was not e-ink but a reflective panel viewable in bright daylight that also had a backlight for indoor/night use. They had a 10" netbook panel commercially available.

It makes me wonder if reading about another exciting screen tech such as this will suffer the same fate. Maybe someone else knows why.

Pixel Qi struck me as overhyped. It was just a regular transflective LCD panel that the founder of OLPC, Nick Negroponte wanted to exploit to get massive funding (from big orgs like the UN, the easily confused ministers of education in developing countries) for his pet project that flew him around the world giving talks and hanging out with popstars who all claim they're doing it to save children in the developing world. If you google Nick Negroponte now, he seems to now claim that he invented or was a key factor in the tablet computing revolution, touchscreens, and VR. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329725&print=yes

Interesting. I knew about transflective screens and miss them from my early cellphones. I guess I need to read what the patents pertain to. A list is here: http://www.toad.com/20141209-dpl-patents.pdf

People want this. Anyone who wants the ability to take a small laptop outside on a nice day and be able to read the screen wants this. I don't particularly care about Negroponte's goals with OLPC but it did bring some technology into discussion that isn't typically used on mobile devices (lithium iron phosphate batteries being another thing to use for rugged outdoors devices...)

Digging up a bit more research it seems Toshiba was the last to use transflective in an ultraportable size. Here's one in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXO7u6bzVGQ

I've wondered that myself. It seemed promising.

Have you tried lowering the brightness? Modern monitors can be crazy bright, which is good for watching movies, but not for staring at them for 10 hours a day.

Unfortunately, on many even the lowest brightness is too much for a low light or no light environment.

Also, at low brightnesses, the PWM frequency of the LED backlights drops, and depending on how low it drops to that can cause a bunch of eyestrain as well.

Did you come across this?

A Canvas Made of Pixels (claybavor.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900439

I used a 30'' Apple HD Cinema monitor to shuffle around the Hermitage painting collection. Setting it at 5 minutes per slide, it's like walking in a museum: fast enough to always be interesting and fresh, but slow enough to enjoy it. Also, used Image Magick to overlay the title of the painting. It makes a lot of difference to know the title. Also, if keep it up for years, it's like art training for the eyes.

I tried something similar and while it definitely works I found such displays even at their lowest brightness setting way too distracting. I continuously notice it's there because it doesn't blend into the rest of the interior, unlike a painting or so. And if you're close enough you feel the heat from it. Very much unlike a painting.

There are a number of Kickstarter projects, none of which would be as awesome as this display.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acanvas/acanvas-the-cor...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mementosmartframe/memen...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atmoph/atmoph-window-yo...

The self-retracting charger on the first one is very cool, and a very good solution to a common problem.

try http://electricobjects.com/ , matte (non glossy) displays built for displaying art in the home

Thank you. Came here to post this in the thread. I love my EO, but I can imagine it being even better with this display technology. They should be an early adopter talking to Eink about is.

I do this with an LCD projector. Works great. (Dungeon required.) Having a massive picture archive on slideshow mode is a fantastic time-keeping mechanism.

So yeah, I'm with you.. it'll be fun to move up to the tower and still get requisite background art.

I never did... until now :)

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