Electronics and print rarely mix, but that may start to change over the next decade. Novalia, a British technology firm, wants to help it happen. By Simon Eccles.
Interactive electronics aren’t something you normally associate with printed products. Nevertheless, they are possible, using similar technologies to those used on smartphones. For the past couple of years Novalia, a small Cambridge firm, has been seeking to bring the message of what can be done and how to do it to a wider circle of brands, designers and printers. It envisages applications in packaging, advertising posters, point of presence displays, toys and games, textiles and greetings cards. The company is essentially a consultancy with hands-on enabling knowledge. ‘We’re about enabling things that are printed to be interactive,’ says Novalia founder Dr Kate Stone. ‘Our team has the skills and experience to offer a diversity of things. Our knowledge is in the area of software, electronics and how to print and design. It’s not about one particular process, but how to create and apply them to create intellectual property.
‘If customers feel that adding interactivity to products can work, then by working with them or their customers we can show how it can be done. We provide the design and electronics, not the end products. If a client has the on-screen and digital part already and wants to apply this to create PoP items, we can advise them, and can go in with them to the customer to make sure they get the best out of it.
In May 2010 the company won the IdTechEx Product Development Award at the Printed Electronics Europe trade show, for the development of its IPM (Interactive Printed Media) controller, a device that enables any printed item to become interactive.
So far it has to be said that industry take-up has yet to happen, apart from a handful of development projects. According to Chris Jones, managing director of Novalia: ‘We’ve been working with a number of brands and done some really cool things, but the frustrating thing is we can’t talk about them!’
So a year ago Novalia developed its own set of public demonstration jobs to stimulate interest, and worked with commercial print and packaging companies to produce them. Some are shown on this page, and you can see videos of them in action on the demonstrations section of the company’s website.
Actually electronics and print have been married together for more than 30 years, though sadly they’ve been pretty well confined to those irritating musical greetings cards, joined in recent years by flashing cards with tiny LEDs and the odd novelty talking pizza box. Superficial these may be, but they involve a neat little package of electronics: a sound generator, a small timer chip and a battery, all wired together with a switch that activates them when you open the item, and hopefully switches them off when you close it.
For whatever reason, the regular use of electronics in print and packaging has barely progressed beyond that, which is strange given that micro electronics are so ubiquitous and that batteries and chips can be minute. Indeed, more than ten years ago DP’s editor was writing articles about the potential of cheap printed thin film displays for preview clips on DVD boxes, but it’s yet to happen.
This may start to change: the UK government through the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) has created the Printable Electronics Technology Centre (PETEC) in Sedgefield. Novalia has been working closely with PETEC and has helped it to justify government investment in a prototyping/pilot/production facility, based on delivering Novalia-type technologies to the UK print and packaging sectors.
Researcher IDTechEx has published a report called ‘Brand Enhancement by Electronics in Packaging 2012-2022,’ that claims the global demand for electronic smart packaging devices is currently at a ‘tipping point’ and will grow rapidly from $0.03 billion in 2012 to $1.7 billion in 2022. It predicts that the electronic packaging market will remain primarily in consumer packaged goods (CPG), reaching 35 billion units with electronic functionality by 2022. ‘The key enabling technology – printed electronics – is about to reduce costs by 99%,’ the report claims. ‘Consequently, many leading brand owners have recently put multidisciplinary teams onto the adoption of the new paper thin electronics on their high volume packaging. It will provide a host of consumer benefits and make competition look very tired indeed. This is mainly about modern merchandising – progressing way beyond static print – and dramatically better consumer propositions.’
Already, it says, ‘electronics are used in packaging from winking rum bottles and talking pizza boxes to aerosols that emit electrically charged insecticide that chases the bug. We even have medication that records how much is taken and when and prompts the user.’
Future applications
Future applications for printed electronics it predicts include brand protection against counterfeiting, voice or music-activated images, contents indicators on aerosol cans, battery condition indicators, disposable medical testers and drug delivery devices, and instruction displays that enlarge type for those who have difficulty reading those tiny printed sheets.
It predicts that the largest likely applications (representing 37% of the total) will be what it terms ‘wink and decal’ – flashing or reprogrammable image areas on packaging or mobile phone covers, while 28% will involve voice or audio output linked to sensors.
So your cornflakes box will urge you to try Cocopops next, while cigarette packs will threaten to kill you.
‘We don’t necessarily endorse IDTechEx’s huge figures, and they may be out by a zero or two,’ says Chris Jones at Novalia. ‘However, whatever the market size turns into, we know it’s going to be quite large.’
Dr Stone is a Cambridge professor who says she started out theorising about future technologies. ‘Ten years ago we were talking about how to create ‘The Minority Report’ experience. That movie was star-gazing, but I started out doing that. I did a PhD at Cambridge and it was all about that vision. It’s had half a billion invested in it and it’s still the future, not reality.
For those who avoid science fiction and/or Tom Cruise, ‘The Minority Report’ was a 2002 movie set in 2054, that included 3D computer displays on thin glass screens, gesture-based user interfaces, and personalised holographic advertising billboards activated by scanning people’s irises as they walked past.
The plausibility of the movie’s props wasn’t accidental: during the planning stage director Stephen Spielberg set up a ‘think tank’ of computer scientists, writers and architects to envisage a future city and its technologies. Dr Stone may being overly pessimistic: ten years on from ‘The Minority Report,’ this sort of technology is in some ways already here.
Sci-fi no more
The Microsoft Kinect sensor gives its XBox 360 games console what is essentially a gesture-based user interface. The Microsoft Surface technology, which readers may remember from the Kodak stand at Ipex 2010, projects an interactive computer display onto glass.
Last month saw a lot of publicity for the charity Plan UK’s ad campaign for third world education of girls. This used an electronic display in a London bus shelter outside Selfridges, fitted with a camera and basic image recognition to tell men from women and display a different image accordingly.
The campaign was developed by agency Clear Channel working with digital signage company 3D Exposure and outdoor media company Curb Media. More advanced facial recognition is under development.
Iris scanners are used for fast-track passport control in some UK airports, though they look like being withdrawn due to poor reliability.
‘Novalia started in 2004, in fabs and printed circuits,’ says Dr Stone. ‘This was a science project, but I wanted to make practical things. I’m interested in working with printers to make things – it’s much more fun! I bought a printing press, a five station Gallus label press. I got covered in ink but I learned the language of printing.’
The demonstration jobs are built around touch sensors linked to a small electronics package behind the print. ‘Conductive inks go on the outside,’ Dr Stone explains. ‘On the other side is a capacitive touch system, similar to what is used on touch screens on iPads. This is sensitive through materials up to 1 cm thick, so it could be used with, for instance, outdoor displays behind plastic such as adshels.’ Wires or printed circuits lead from the touch system to an electronics package, which can be placed pretty well anywhere inside a pack or behind a billboard. In principle the electronics could be pretty sophisticated, far beyond the simple flashing lights and sounds of the demo jobs. Dr Stone is thinking in terms of a fairly complex set of functions being built into those hypothetical adshel posters, for instance. ‘Today you can buy silicon microprocessors for less than 10p each from Asia and they’ll have the same sort of computing power as an early Apple computer,’ she points out.’
Some sort of power supply will be needed for the electronics. Illuminated backlit posters and adshels could tap the mains supplies, but self-contained packs and PoP items will need batteries. Novalia is also working with a US company called Blue Spark Technologies, which has developed very thin printable batteries, which could be incorporated in the printed jobs (probably glued on rather than being produced in the main print run for the foreseeable future).
The same concept could be extended to thin film displays, making the idea of self-contained video clips or maybe even instructions on packaging a future reality. ‘We have worked with LEPs (light emitting polymers), OLED (organic light emitting diode) displays etc,’ Dr Stone confirms. ‘We have government grants and we are working with other companies that have the technology.’
Dr Stone may be still waiting for the market to catch up with Novalia’s vision, but she’s confident it will happen. ‘The idea of printing is to communicate,’ she says. ‘What we are about is enabling printers to add more interest to their products.’
Contact: www.novalia.co.uk
