Ambient displays

Mary Lou Jepsen

Mary Lou Jepsen (born 1965) was the founding chief technology officer of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), an organization whose mission is to deliver low-cost, mesh-networked laptops en masse to children in developing countries. For her work in creating the laptop Time Magazine named her to its 2008 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Jepsen is married to John Conor Ryan, formerly a partner at Monitor Group, who has recently joined Pixel Qi.

Early life and education

Jepsen studied Studio Art and Electrical Engineering at Brown, and went on to receive a Ph.D. in Optical Sciences there. She later received a Master of Science in Holography from the MIT Media Lab. Her contributions have had world-wide adoption in head-mounted display, HDTV and projector products.

Her PhD work combined rigorous theoretical coupled-wave analysis with lab work, in which she created large-scale, embossed surface-relief diffraction gratings with liquid crystal-filled grooves with high diffraction efficiency in un-polarized illumination.

She has created some of the largest ambient displays ever. In Cologne, Germany she built a holographic replica of pre-existing buildings in the city's historic district...and created a holographic display encompassing a city block. She also conceived, built mathematical models of, resolved the fundamental engineering issues, and solved some of the logistics - to create what would have been the largest display ever for mankind: images displayed on the darkened moon. She co-created the first holographic video system in the world at the MIT Media Lab in 1989, where the interference structure of the hologram was computed at video rates, and shown on her hand-made display. This system inspired a new subfield of holographic video and received numerous awards.

Microdisplay Corp

Jepsen helped pioneer single-panel field sequential projection display systems, co-founding Microdisplay, the first company whose sole effort was the development of tiny displays, in 1995. There she served as its chief technology officer through 2003.

Recent work and One Laptop per Child

From 2003 until the end of the 2004, she was the chief technology officer of Intel’s Display Division.

In January 2005, Jepsen joined Nicholas Negroponte to lead the design, partnering, development and manufacture of the laptop, and for the entire first year of the effort was the only employee of One Laptop per Child [OLPC].

OLPC

By the end of 2005, she had completed the initial architecture, led the development of the first prototype (which UN Secretary General Kofi Annan unveiled at a UN summit), and signed up some of the world's largest manufacturers to produce the XO-1. By the end of 2007 she had led the laptop through development and into high volume mass production.

At OLPC, notably, Jepsen invented the laptop's sunlight-readable display technology and co-invented its ultra-low power management system - and - has transformed these inventions into high volume mass production rapidly. The XO laptop is the lowest cost laptop ever made, the lowest-power laptop ever made, and the most environmentally friendly laptop ever made. The laptop can sustain 5 foot drops, is mesh networked extending the reach of the network by letting signals hop from laptop to laptop.

Pixel Qi

After 3 years with OLPC, In early 2008 she left OLPC to start a for-profit company, Pixel Qi, to commercialize some of the technologies she invented at OLPC. Her premise: the CPU is no longer important, nor is the operating system. Portables are all about the screen. Typical laptop screens run for about $100 (compared to the CPU which at the low end has hit $10), cause the largest drain on the battery, are difficult to read for hours on end, don't have integated touchscreens and electronics, and aren't sunlight readable. She has started a new company, Pixel Qi, to move forward on screen innovations in these areas using the existing LCD factories as is, but with clever conceptual design changes that allow her company to move from idea to high volume mass production in less than a year, as she did with the screen for the OLPC laptop. In the limit the screen with integrated touch (and speakers and wireless) is the laptop.