E-ink device like Amazon’s Kindle are great, but real paper documents are more than one page. Navigating between pages can be a pain. One project seeks to fix that by linking between two E-ink devices
Nicholas Chen from the University of Maryland has created a very cool prototype that allows users to have a link chosen on one device show up on another. Just choose a link with a stylus, point to it using a special gesture, and it will show up on the other one.
It’s also possible to place the tablets together using magnets. The experience is like having a physical book in each hand, with the pages facing each other. As you flip through the document on one of the devices, the other one will change the page at the same time. It’s a very handy solution to the limited screen space on E-Ink devices. You might actually be able to comfortably read a long novel or replicate the experience of opening up a broadsheet newspaper on one of these things.
Chen brought three tablets with him to demonstrate his project. I’m not sure how the third tablet would work exactly, but I’m one of those people who think that more is always better. The third tablet could be used to browse my documents while the other two actually show them. I hope this idea makes it out of the research stage and into commercial production. Amazon or some other company could probably make a lot of money selling to people who would like to linger over newspapers, magazines and books over coffee. Having the devices spread out is more comfortable than just reading on one screen. In the future, the prices would come down to make owning more than one tablet cheap enough for most people.
We’ve covered E-ink devices with the Snaplet and Phosphor E-ink watches.
