Courtesy of HP Labs
HP IonTouch technology. Imager (left) and Rewritable media (Right)
HP’s IonTouch technology offers a new way to securely place timely, personalized, and rewriteable visual information onto small digital displays. Invented in HP Labs and now being tested at several HP sites, the technology could impact industries as diverse as finance, hospitality, healthcare, security, retail, and transportation.
The HP Labs effort is unusual for its technical breadth, requiring innovations in hardware, software, and networking as well as the chemistry and physics of a new kind of media.
HP IonTouch is also an example of HP Labs’ ability to move well beyond a demonstration or proof of concept of an idea and instead develop a fully functioning pilot.
For that to happen, however, researchers in HP’s Print Adjacencies and 3D Lab needed to create an entire software ecosystem to support their innovative new display hardware – and do it quickly.
“The answer was to engage with the open source community,” notes senior researcher Rares Vernica. “It let us move both more efficiently and effectively.”
The HP Labs team needed a software stack that extended from firmware for the real-time processor controlling the motors and the print heads, to the software running the printers and print display terminals, as well as cloud management tools that would loop both users and data into the solution. A second set of programs, of almost the same size, was required to monitor every aspect of a printer once deployed, including the multiple sensor readings that indicate the physical state of each printer in the system.
Open source programs exist that do all of these things, Vernica explains. “We use them a little like Lego bricks,” he says. “We take pieces of different shapes and fit them together.”
