Electronic paper
I realized that a true electronic substitute to paper was missing and how important it could be to cross the gap with an "electronic paper". I find it interesting because of its implication for human
It really looks like regular ink, doesn't hurt the eyes, is portable, flexible and uses very little power.
The technologies employed today to display information are still separated, they can't be really used simultaneously. Transfer of information between an analog form to a digital form take many step nowadays. Think about the scanner and printer, mouse and keyboard, flat screen monitors and regular paper (books).
When the e-paper will come, it'll make possible to gain advantage from both technologies in terms of reliability and usability and really deploy the potential flexibility of the digital text. I see improvement in following fields: information management, storage and information spreading at low cost, updating information rapidly and remotely. It could replace computers in text-related tasks.
As such, it could have an impact in the way text is displayed anywhere, on our usage of printed text: books, newspaper, for commercial purposes like advertisements, mobile devices, signs of transportation systems...
The e-paper is made out of tiny white particles contained in a small sphere of black oil. Depending on the electric charge applied, they make black or white pixels.
We can associated other technologies to make it even more versatile : rollable plastic display, displays you can hand-write on with handwriting recognition software, to display changing images and like video, to display images in colors.
Ref:
Here's a selection of articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1530678.stm
E-ink consortium: http://www.eink.com/index.html
One commercial device is the Sony Ready: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Reader
Rollable display: http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2665&p=20
Another step to cross the gap is the "digital paper" which is basically text recognition on (nearly) plain paper. You write notes on paper with a special pen, it recognizes what you've written and it uploads it to a computer. The pages you've handwritten are then directly transmitted to a digital form.
Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_paper