Video: Agile fashion Sometimes life is in the slow lane has its
advantages. Eschewing the fashion for screens that can refresh
hundreds of times a second, Daniel Saakes, Kevin Chiu and Tyler
Hutchison from the Camera Culture group at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and Naoya Koizumi from the Graduate
School of Media Design at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, have
built displays that changes only every few hours. The benefit,
they say is unparalleled energy efficiency. The group's Slow
Display uses less than 2 watts of power to display an image on a
screen with a diagonal dimension of 3.2 metres – a standard LCD
screen with a diagonal dimension of just 1.3 metres can use 100
to 200 watts. Although there are alternative low-power display
technologies such as electronic ink or cholesteric liquid
crystal displays, they are difficult to scale without simply
tiling a large number of smaller displays, says Saakes's team.
Consequently, their technology is better suited for the slow-
changing, always-on digi