Spotlight On
A spotlight on Pervasive Displays
The possibilities are endless when it comes to e-paper displays. From smart boxes for retailers to smart coffee mugs, displays are being used like never before. CIE editor, Amy Wallington talks to Scott Soong, CEO, Pervasive Displays, about his career and experience in the electronic displays industry
Scott Soong, CEO, Pervasive Displays S
cott Soong has over a decade of experience in software in addition to 12 years working in electronic displays businesses. During his career, he has been a founding partner at four start-up companies, including Pervasive Displays. Scott sits on the board of several other technology businesses as a consulting partner. He was a board member of One Laptop Per Child, which looks to provide children in developing countries with rugged, low-cost, low- power, connected laptops. Scott has an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and a BA from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, US.
How did you become involved in e-paper displays with Pervasive Displays?
My grandparents and granduncles were 34 September 2016
founders of the Chi Mei Corporation in Taiwan. It is now one of the largest plastics producers in the world. I lived in the US as a young adult but returned to Taiwan and joined the family business, which had diversified into electronic displays through Chi Mei Optoelectronics. I was working on digital signage for retail when I heard about the One Laptop Per Child project. Nicholas Negroponte, chairman emeritus of MIT Media Lab, founded the project, together with other luminaries. I got involved in the project and learned that an incredibly high percentage of schools around the world – maybe 60 per cent – don’t have electricity, and millions of children worldwide return home to houses where candles are still used for illumination. At the same time, I was introduced to the inventors of e-ink, a technology that came out of the MIT Media Lab. With their encouragement, I started to design and manufacture low power displays that can run for years on small batteries or harvested energy. Energy is scarce in a majority of the developing world and I saw a real opportunity to contribute to the democratisation of access to technology in these regions.
How is what you are doing at Pervasive Displays really going to make a difference in people’s lives?
Giving people the right information at the right place and at the right time is a core principle of what I’m trying to achieve, even in places where there is no electricity power grid. It’s my mantra really. We’ve been working with e-paper displays for seven years, continuously improving the efficiency of both the product and its supply chain so that we can serve a very wide range of applications, not just the obvious ones like e-readers.
Components in Electronics
Figure 2: Pervasive Displays’ batteryless e-paper displays used on chairs supplied by Casala to Westminster Abbey
One important goal is to enable a new class of applications with displays that run entirely on harvested energy, usually from solar, kinetic, inductive, or thermal sources. We leverage the energy efficiencies of
microcontrollers (MCUs); the more efficient the MCU, the more efficient it is to drive our display. Our ultra-low power displays are typically used with a coin cell battery such as a CR-2032. A single battery will support eight display updates per day for five years while consuming barely a quarter of that battery’s capacity. If the display does not update that frequently, even less energy is consumed because no energy is required to maintain a static image.
This characteristic enables e-paper displays to be updated using energy harvested from Bluetooth or near field communications (NFC) signals. One example of this is a batteryless e-paper chair numbering and identification system used in Westminster Abbey. The displays built into the seats are configured using an NFC handheld remote control to show row number, seat number or logos.
E-paper is also evolving as an ideal companion technology for radio frequency identification systems (RFID). RFID tags can be active or passive. Passive
versions consume no energy, like static e- paper displays, and are programmed with information using RF signals. Adding an e-paper display to a tag means that people can read that information and optical devices, such as barcode scanners or optical character readers, may be used to read it too. In other words, adding e- paper to RFID systems makes them infinitely more flexible and suited to a much wider range of applications – all without having to introduce a battery.
What are some of your goals as CEO of Pervasive Displays?
One of my goals is to continue the drive to digitise retailers and make them more successful. I’ve seen first-hand how pricing strategies are important to retail success but today’s retailers also have to try to replicate the information-rich online shopping experience into their physical stores. In addition to getting pricing right, they need to communicate product ingredients, country or region of origin, customer reviews and similar kinds of information. One of the ways of doing this is to enable customers to scan a QR code on a shelf label, which takes them to a product web page. By replacing the paper shelf label with a digital e-paper version, retailers can
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