HP's Flexible eSkin Displays Make Every Gadget Surface a Screen

New material could turn the surface of products into screens themselves.

By Dan Smith Posted 06.02.2009 at 2:40 pm 2 Comments

eSkin Thin flexible screens that could be used as coatings for electronics.

E-ink displays are already common in devices like the Kindle, but HP has taken the tech a step further with thin, printable color displays called eSkins. Printed in massive rolls, eSkins can then be cut and used as a thin coating on, say, your laptop's lid, turning the surface into an active, color display.

The material is infused with ultra-thin circuitry and an electronically-controlled ink available in a wide range of Pantone colors, which are conveyed in “print quality.” As in all e-ink displays, a current passes through the substrate to activate the ink; otherwise, the eSkin is transparent to reveal the surface underneath. The eSkin material are flexible and can be manufactured in large-scale rolls rather than individually, making them cheaper and ensuring that our eyes will not have to suffer through looking at any static, information-less screen in the future.

[Press Release]

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2 Comments

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animemaster

06/03/09 at 4:35 am

I want it on my windshield hooked up with sensors to block the sun and any glints from hitting my eyes. It could also be a hud display and when I'm parked it could be left totally on to keep sunlight from getting in at all.

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PetrBuben

06/04/09 at 1:11 pm

This HUGE ... World Technology Philosophy General Reality Paradigm Shift! - "Flexible displays" ..it is not what you see, or what you think it is, it's what we display on it :]

http://FriendFeed.com/PetrBuben :]

and combine this with the upcoming principle of invisibility ... and underlying revolution of nanotechnology .... and, we do have a mess - the end of the world, in fact, ... at least as we thought we knew it, .. if we are lucky, that is