The Australian Road and Maritime Services has installed e-paper traffic signs on Sydney roads, representing the first time that electronic e ink, a technology best known from e-book readers and smart watches, has been used in traffic signage.
E Ink has partnered up with Visionect to have 15 solar powered parking and road signs distributed all over the capital of New South Wales. One of the great things about this technology is that the displays draw no power while still displaying critical data. If the Australian Road and Maritime Services needs to update anything they can simply push out the new data directly to the sign, since each one has a 3G internet connection.
When nighttime inevitably arrives each sign has the same front-lit technology found on the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite or the Kobo Glo HD. This will allow motorists to be able to continue to read all of the information.
Traffic signage might be a huge industry that e Ink can garner a ton of revenue from. It has been reported that the city Los Angeles puts up 558,000 temporary parking restrictions signs every year to the cost of $9.5 million – a strain on staff and resources that can be reduced by implementing permanent e-paper signs with content easily customizable via cellular networks.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
