Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Oof, that's even way too slow for e-book usage. Still, it's nice to see this technology progressing. There's obviously a massive use case for battery-limited devices like smartwatches and smartphones.

The dream of someday coding on a high-resolution decent-refresh-rate color e-paper monitor is still alive!

View on HN

Well, what you could do is strap two back to back to each other. So like front: page1, back: page2. Then when you "turn the page" it skips evens/odds and you just flip the display over to get page2 while page3 buffers on the other side :p

Manual double buffering :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_buffering

Flipping back to page1 would be problematic.

not if they are bound with a circular ring

There are still tons of applications:

Digital photo frames that cycle throughout the day, dynamic posters and murals with art that changes with the time or viewer, refreshing price labels, clocks with minute resolution, data visualization over large time intervals, informational displays...

You might not even have to paint the entire screen at once, but can perhaps update only the dirty regions.

Not everything needs to display video or respond in real time to human input. There's so much painted in the world around us that could have value added by letting it refresh on the day, hour, or minute.

BestBuy already uses eink for their price tags. Something like this: https://www.eink.com/electronic-shelf-label.html?type=applic...

The only way I'd accept one of these hanging on my wall was if it had computer vision to check & verify that there's nobody in the room before it starts that god-awful flickery 25 second update process. Eurgh.

Someone did something like this with a torn-apart 5k iMac, mounting the display in a gilded frame and having it cycle through various images of fine art but only when the camera determined that nobody was looking at it.

https://www.claybavor.com/blog/a-canvas-made-of-pixels

>A fun (but impractical and frustrating) variant of this feature is to have the image change as soon as the viewer looks away. So you’re looking at a painting, glance away to another room, and look back to find a new painting hanging on the wall.

Also interesting that the iMac doesn't have TrueTone, so he had to do the white-balance matching himself.

Oh come now, if it updated oncer per day, that's 25 seconds of flicker per 86,375 seconds of viewing. And you could set it to update at 2am when everyone is asleep.

(Computer vision would be cool though, imagine if it was different every time you left and re-entered a room?)

Humans are pretty perceptive of things flickering in the periphery of their vision, especially when they happen only rarely (as opposed to, say, xmas tree lights).

That said, you could probably put a one-cell LCD (like those shadeable windows on the 787) over the screen to black it out during the update.

Should be enough for keyboards !

> The dream of someday coding on a high-resolution decent-refresh-rate color e-paper monitor is still alive!

Honestly I'd say this is possible now. Modern two-color (usually black/red) e-paper panels can refresh at 5-10hz. Grayscale only panels can go even faster, but it's not a huge problem for text. My e-reader gets around 100 hours of battery life but drops under 10 if I enable wifi and any lighting. That's running a lightly modified android. I'd imagine a dedicated os just for text and vpn/git could do quite well. Currently the only players in the big e-paper market are going for ereader or "sketchbook" markets.

I'm guessing it's faster if it's only rendering a small photo within a page (like a textbook). If the area of the image is roughly 1/10 the page, with the rest being basic b&w text. It should take a few seconds only.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com