By Adam Fendelman

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Today's gripe with the notion of a wirelessly updating tablet replacing your morning newspaper is that it'll lack the timeless feel of an old-fashioned newspaper.

So why not keep the blacken-your-fingers feel but make the paper smarter and more dynamic? That's the paper route being envisioned by Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Gyricon Media, a 75-person spin-off of Xerox and creator of the patented "SmartPaper" product.

SmartPaper can be thought of as paper that amalgamates the functionality of an LCD screen (as used by your cell phone's display) with the thinness, flexibility and old-fashioned feel of regular paper.

More specifically, SmartPaper is produced in a roll (originally handmade, but now developed by a machine) and is actually two sheets of thin plastic with millions of tiny bichromal beads (somewhat like toner particles) embedded in between. Each bead is about 90 microns in size - the width of a strand of human hair - and is smaller than a grain of sand.

Each bead has a contrasting color on each half or "side," and their hemispheres have either a positive or negative charge. The beads reside in their own oil-filled cavities within the sheet (like eggs in an egg carton), and when under the influence of surface voltage, they rotate to present one side or the other to plain view.

The image stays in place until a new voltage pattern is applied, which erases the previous image and generates a new one (like the old Etch A Sketch toys).

Gyricon says that while its product may have a chance as the "newspaper of the future" down the road, for now, it's taking baby steps to get there. The company on Tuesday opened a $10 million, 48,000-square-foot plant to manufacture SmartPaper, which is currently being used in the world of retail as signage.

Through pilot programs with Macy's and other retail outlets, Gyricon is trying to prevent stores from having to create lots of signs for one event and then recreate them en masse for another.

"Back-to-school signs have to be made six weeks in advance," said Jim Welch, a spokesman for Gyricon Media. "What if we had signs to which we could wirelessly send messages, each with its own IP address and pricing information sent from our server?"

A pilot program with The Wall Street Journal will rotate the newspaper's daily headlines atop newsstands each day using wireless transmission, preventing the need for new signs.

As for price, Welch says the company is currently undecided: "It's up in the air in terms of pricing. We don't yet have the economies of scale. We're not going to replace paper. It'll be a premium cost above paper around the price of a low-cost e-book."

Down the road, the idea is for you to buy one electronic newspaper that is reusable and has wirelessly updating properties. The display technology was invented at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and is called "Gyricon," which became the name adopted by Gyricon Media.

In terms of actually creating the image, there are many possibilities - none of which Gyricon has put its fingers on.

Sheets could be fed into printer-like devices that will erase old images and create new ones. Such devices may be made so compact and inexpensive that you could carry one in your purse or briefcase at all times.

Another possibility is a "wand" that could be pulled by hand across a sheet of electronic reusable paper to create an image. With a built-in input scanner, this wand may become a hand-operated multi-function device capable of acting as a printer, copier, fax and scanner in one.

For applications requiring more rapid and direct electronic update, the Gyricon material might be packaged with a simple electrode structure on the surface and used more like a traditional display. A collection of these displays may be bound into an electronic book. With the appropriate electronics stored in the spine of the book, pages might be updated at will to display different content.

For portable applications, an active matrix array may be used to rapidly update a partial- or full-page display, much like what is used in today's portable devices. Gyricon displays don't require backlighting or constant refreshing, and are said to be brighter than today's reflective displays.

The Author
Adam Fendelman is Editor-in-Chief of EPRAIRIE.COM. He can be contacted at .