With all the information we encounter on a daily basis, see how far text has come.

1. Electronic Ink (our next generation for text) David Jurewicz EDT 514 Winter 2008

8. If you were to take thousands of these beach balls and lay them out on a field, and make the ping-pong balls move between the top and bottom of the beach balls, you could make the field change color. That's the principle behind electronic ink. Photos courtesy E Ink Here you can see how E Ink's pigment chips would react to positive and negative charges.

9. In reality, these microcapsules are only 100 microns wide, and roughly 100,000 microcapsules can fit into a square inch of paper. In each of those microcapsules there are hundreds of smaller pigmented chips. In prototypes, E Ink is currently working with white chips and blue ink, but it is working to develop other color inks that could lead to multicolor displays. Photos courtesy E Ink Here you can see how E Ink's pigment chips would react to positive and negative charges.

10. When an electrical charge is applied to the microcapsules, the chips will either rise to the top or be pulled to the bottom. When pushed to the top, the chips make the capsules look white; when they are pulled to the bottom, the viewer only sees the dark ink. Patterns of white and dark can then be created to form words and sentences. Photos courtesy E Ink Here you can see how E Ink's pigment chips would react to positive and negative charges.