Pixel Qi CEO on OLPC, future of display technology

Mary Lou Jepsen is the former chief technology officer of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization. Her discoveries in display technology have helped create the XO, a laptop known for its low price and eco-friendliness. She is now focusing on advancing display technology with her company, Pixel Qi, which she founded in early 2008.

You gained worldwide recognition for your work with OLPC. How are you taking these technologies further with Pixel Qi? There is something about starting fresh. We started with a blank slate at Pixel Qi, and we have some very cool new screen designs that we anticipate will be on store shelves [this] year in both laptops and e-book readers.

Dossier

Name: Mary Lou Jepsen

Title: CEO

Company: Pixel Qi

Location: Taipei and San Bruno, Calif.

Favorite technology: All things optical.

Philosophy in a nutshell: "When people tell you something is impossible, what they are really saying is that it's an interesting project."

Most interesting place she has ever visited: "As a freshman in college, the holography lab. It absorbed the next decade of my life."

Favorite vice: The free sake at the ANA Lounge in Narita Airport.

Favorite nonwork pastimes: "What's that? Outside work? It will be a while... but seeing friends, kayaking, bike riding, seeing and making art, and going to concerts."

The OLPC screen was great but never had great color; its color was washed out -- by design. We started over and came up with a new design -- a new kind of LCD screen that has great color, but also a stunning e-paper mode, which is also a dramatic improvement over the OLPC e-paper state. In addition, we have driven the power consumption down. We are working on intertwining the display with the CPU and motherboard to dramatically further lower the cost and vastly prolong the battery life of the laptop between charges.

Longer term, we are developing products for 2010-2011 where we can completely remove the backlight from the LCD in laptops. These displays will be bright and colorful in room light and bright sunlight. They will be easy to read and offer ultralow power consumption -- less than 1% of current LCD power consumption.

What do you think displays will look like in five years? Ten years? I think that the future of portable computing is all about the screen.

Look at an iPhone; all you see is the screen. With cloud computing and thin-client technologies, we don't need a motherboard or a CPU anymore -- just a transceiver and a screen. In a very real way, I think that we will see, more and more, new forms of portables emerging that are dictated by the screen alone.

Historic estimates of the future of display technology have been exceedingly poor. We were all supposed to have holographic video by 1985. Now we hear that it's OLEDs or electrophoretics [a type of low-power, passive display] coming next.

I disagree. Here's why: The manufacturing development of these new technologies and materials takes many years and billions of dollars. OLEDs and electrophoretics were promised in high-volume mass production a decade ago and still attain annual volumes of less than 1 million units a year, with quality and reliability that fall well short of what mature markets demand.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.