While I am not 100% certain why we are so interested in creating electronics that are disposable (don’t we already have enough dumb materials worth throwing away?) it is always interesting to chart the development of what is lovingly being called e-paper.

The basic idea is that paper can be a connected, multimedia experience and that our notebooks don’t need to be the dumb, difficult to archive bits of dead trees they are today.

University of Cincinnati researches are making progress in this arena with a process known as Electrowetting.

A discovery by University of Cincinnati engineering researcher Andrew Steckl could revolutionize display technology with e-paper that’s fast enough for video yet cheap enough to be disposable.

He and his team have demonstrated that paper could be used as a flexible host material for an electrowetting device. Electrowetting (EW) involves applying an electric field to colored droplets within a display in order to reveal content such as type, photographs and video.

The discovery has far-reaching implications, considering that other popular e-readers on the market such as the Kindle and iPad rely on complex circuitry printed over a rigid glass substrate.

Read New e-reader paper discovered that’s fast enough for video yet cheap enough to be disposable (Via Kurzeilai) (Images)

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