Rethinking display technology
The inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, minted an intriguing term recently: "pixel wallpaper." The idea is that any object, any surface, can potentially be a canvas for displaying information.Already, Boston is emerging as a hub for these next-generation digital displays. We have Myvu Corp., integrating full-color screens into eyeglasses that can be plugged into an iPod; Ambient Devices, Inc., selling umbrellas with handles that flash when thunderstorms are expected; and E Ink Corp., producing a paper-thin electronic billboard for the cover of the September issue of Esquire - plus the screens for Amazon.com's Kindle e-book device.
Three other local companies are trying to bring new kinds of displays to market - one started by students from MIT's Media Lab, a second by the founder of Ambient Devices, and a third by a Boston architect.
David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi created one of the coolest demos the Media Lab has seen in years: A set of small, square wireless devices they dubbed "Siftables." Each one is about the size of a stack of four Saltine crackers, with a color screen on top.
Merrill calls them "physical interfaces for manipulating digital content," meaning Siftables are designed to be moved and handled. They can communicate wirelessly with each other and a PC.
Imagine sending a series of photographs or video clips from a PC to a group of a dozen Siftables, and then rearranging them on a table to change the sequencing of a slide show or movie. Or, since the Siftables know how they're oriented in space thanks to an internal accelerometer, one might display the front of a mechanical drawing when held in one position, and the side or back of the drawing when tilted in the right direction.
"You play with blocks and trains as a kid, and then you graduate to using computers, and all of your interactions get rammed through the 101 buttons of the keyboard and the mouse," says Merrill.
Games are another possibility. One Siftables demo has the devices display a set of letters that must be rearranged into words before the letters on all the screens vanish and are replaced with new ones.
Merrill says it costs about $200 to $250 to make each device, but that should decrease with higher production volumes. He and Kalanithi are laying the foundation for a start-up. They're thinking they may grow the company organically, without venture capital investment, by initially selling the devices to artists, designers, and other researchers. Merrill doesn't sound too gung-ho about licensing the technology to a big consumer electronics maker: "We're the ones who have the vision of how we'd like to see it deployed in the world."
David Rose's last company, Ambient Devices, received key financial support from Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Media Lab. This time, with Vitality Inc., Rose's angel investor is Patrick Soon-Shiong, a Los Angeles pharmaceutical billionaire who has put $3 million into the company. Vitality's mission is to turn the cap on your pill bottles into a display that flashes (and chimes) to remind you to take your medicine. Half of US residents, Rose says, take some kind of prescription medicine, and of those, only about half actually comply with the instructions for taking it. Noncompliance can lead to serious medical problems.
A simple version of the cap, called GlowCap Solo, goes on sale next month for $29.95. It supplies a reminder to pop a pill at a specified time. "The light on it pulses for an hour, and then pulses with sound for an hour," Rose explains. It stops haranguing you only after you've removed it - and presumably taken your medicine.
A more complex, wirelessly connected version of the cap is just starting a usability trial at the Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners HealthCare that evaluates and deploys new technologies. This GlowCap can automatically send in a refill order to a pharmacy - and also e-mail you a weekly report on how well you're following the doctor's orders. Rose also says doctors may be interested in access to this information, with the patient's consent, to determine whether cholesterol remains high, for example, simply because a patient hasn't been taking his medication.
The connected cap will cost more. But Rose believes pharmacy chains might be interested in supplying it free to their customers, and paying Vitality a monthly service fee, because "for every $1 spent on prescriptions at a pharmacy, they get $5 in other discretionary spending in the store." A later stage of the trial at the Center for Connected Health will explore whether the connected caps actually change patients' drug-taking behavior.
A2A Media Inc., based in Boston, isn't a developer of display technology, but rather is trying to market in the United States a technology called Mediamesh, produced by a German joint venture. Mediamesh embeds colored LEDs into a curtain of narrow horizontal bars that are held together with thin stainless steel cabling.
Affixed to the exterior of a building, Mediamesh becomes a full-color, full-motion electronic billboard. Its design allows residents to see out, provides some shade that can lower the building's air conditioning bill, and helps keep LEDs cool thanks to air circulation around the bars - avoiding the overheating that has been problem with the giant digital display on the facade of WGBH's headquarters.
"Our displays use about one-sixth the energy of a traditional LED display like WGBH's," says Andrew Melton, an architect who is A2A's chief executive. "It's also possible that we can use solar panels on rooftops to power the display."
Melton envisions installing the displays on parking garages and stadiums. He could share revenue from advertising with the building owner, pay a lease for rights to the space, or sell the display outright.
He negotiated a deal with the German manufacturers of Mediamesh, which doesn't require him to pay a royalty or give up any equity in his company - he'll simply help sell the product in the United States. An investment of $3.8 million last November from W2Group Inc., a marketing and public relations holding company founded by Larry Weber, will give the company a budget to build awareness.
While architectural renderings in A2A's offices show its technology plastered over Vegas resorts and Gillette Stadium, the company is only now on the verge of unveiling its first installation: a library at the Fresno campus of Cal State, where a small A2A display should be operational later this year. Plastering the world with pixel wallpaper could take some time.