Sony’s 13-inch Digital Paper is the first device to use a flexible e-ink display

After almost a year of agonizing posturing by Sony, the semi-flexible 13.3-inch Digital Paper has finally been unveiled. The Digital Paper supports stylus input, has built-in WiFi, and lasts up to three weeks on a single charge. The key technology here is the new Mobius display from E Ink, which is very light and highly flexible — though it isn’t clear how much of that flexibility made it into the final Digital Paper product.

When it comes to displays, the problem — as far as weight and flexibility are concerned — has always been the substrate. The liquid crystals, the organic diodes, the capsules of ink, the transistors, the wiring — all of the key display stuff is already light and flexible. But you have to build all of that stuff on something heat-resistant and transparent —  i.e. glass. Glass is heavy (especially at larger sizes), and it’s very brittle (especially when it’s thin, which is necessitated by weight constraints). Glass is a terrible display substrate, basically, but sadly there hasn’t been another option. Until now.

At $1100 (shipping in May), Digital Paper is being pitched at education, business, and legal environments. Digital Paper appears to only support PDFs, but the website implies that software is included to convert Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files to PDF format. Stylus input appears to be accurate and high-resolution, though e-ink’s refresh latency might cause you some mental discomfort. 4GB of internal storage and a micro SD slot should give you plenty of space for annotating textbooks and documents. At just 357 grams (12.6 ounces), Digital Paper is by far the lightest large-screen tablet on the market, too (the iPad Air is a chunky 469 grams). Hopefully this is the beginning of an exciting, flexible-and-light-weight computing revolution!

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Tour a Digital World that Defies Physics

The aim of the rubix project was to develop an animation that described a conceptual tool for deploying these malleable virtual environments that could be used by their creators to shift space around us.

This video thrives on convention – specifically: breaking with it. In the same vein as M.C. Escher, The Matrix or, more recently, Inception (or even the building flips and slides in Transformers), this surreal experience calls into question everyday architectures that surround us.

Imagine a world where urban fabric was what the latter implies: a delicate, woven-together series of structures and infrastructure forever flipped and rearranged at the whim of … whom? Perhaps you, perhaps another consciousness, or perhaps something created by a blind watchmaker, as it were, rotating city blocks like rows on a Rubik’s Cube.

Be sure to view the above realistic animated video in full size for the complete effect. Our brain recognizes patterns, then expects those things within such patterns (like trains on rails, or a waterfall) to conform to known laws of physics and thermodynamics – strip away that certainty and you start to learn something about human cognition and our relationship to world.

From the project creator, Chris Kelly, who created this as a graduate project: “Our understanding of space is not always a direct function of the sensory input but a perceptual undertaking in the brain where we are constantly making subconscious judgements that accept or reject possibilities supplied to us from our sensory receptors,” he says. “This process can lead to illusions or manipulations of space that the brain perceives to be reality.”

The thesis that goes with these videos and images:  Time and Relative Dimensions in Space: The Possibilities of Utilising Virtual[ly Impossible] Environments in Architecture. “The redirection techniques and the use of overlapping architecture allow the same physical space to hold a much larger virtual space”, giving it all kinds of applications in collaborative gaming and interactive art as well as architectural and urban design.

More on the project: “The aim of the rubix project was to develop an animation that described a conceptual tool for deploying these malleable virtual environments that could be used by their creators to shift space around us. The rubix concept stemmed from the need for an algorithmic formula for controlling the use of redirection techniques; it allows for many different spatial combinations whilst a level of control is constantly maintained. In the animation the initial Escher-esque space is a representation of our perceptual system where huge amounts of information arrive in the brain from multiple streams. The process of perception involves the brain selecting and rejecting contradicting pieces of information leading to a perception of reality that only gives us glimpses into the world we are in.”

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