Flexible phone made from electronic paper to debut in Canada

[busybeeburns]

 

Flexible phone made from electronic paper to debut in Canada

 

A prototype flexible smartphone made of electronic paper has been created by Canadian researchers.

 

The PaperPhone can do all the things bulkier smartphones can do such as make and take calls, send messages, play music or display e-books. The gadget triggers different functions and features when bent, folded and flexed at its corners or sides.

 

"Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years," said creator Dr Roel Vertegaal. The device emerged from a collaboration between researchers at the Human Media Lab at Queen's University, Canada and Arizona State University's Motivational Environments Research group. "This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper," said Dr Vertegaal in a statement. "You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen."

 

The millimetres thick prototype is built from the same e-ink technology found in Amazon's Kindle e-book reader and this is bonded to flex sensors and a touchscreen that interprets drawings and text written on it.

 

The prototype was created in order to investigate how easy it is for people to use bending and flexing to control such a device. The early version is connected to a laptop to interpret and record the ways test subjects flexed it.

 

Dr Vertegaal predicted that widespread use of larger versions of the PaperPhone might make the paperless office a reality. The PaperPhone prototype will be on display on 10 May at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Vancouver.

 

At the same show the research team plan to show off a device they called the Snaplet. This device takes on different functions depending on how it is worn and bent.

 

The wristband is a watch when convex, a PDA when flat and a phone when concave.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13308452

[mc_squared]

Will it be available on a "paper"-as-you-go network?:P

[SueDeNimes]

Wow, that's interesting!

Thanks for the article.

I'm curious if we'll ever hear about it again though.

 

Did you read the actual article?

http://www.hml.queensu.ca/files/chi2011LaheyGestureFlexDisplay38%20FINAL%20FINAL.pdf

It's about the bending. An actual use is not yet possible and seems to be hard to realise in the future.

 

This is a part of it:

 

 

 

The main limitation of this work resides in the physical

engineering of the prototype display, which restricted bending

to one side of the display. This reduced the number of

bend gestures available for consideration. We believe this

limitation did not outweigh benefits of being able to evaluate

a functional flexible display, with results representing a

significant subset of findings for a full flex display. While it

was possible for us to detect continuous (analog) bend gestures,

the slow refresh rate of flexible E Ink delayed visual

feedback, making real-time animation impossible. Effects

of display size on the use of bend gestures may be answered

through future studies: We believe that with appropriate

material qualities, bends could apply from small to large

form factors. We expect touch input to complement bends

and recognize the challenges this presents: current flex

touch input options are limited. In addition, our study proposed

a maximum of six actions per application, which was

the max number of single bend gestures available given our

constraints. An important step to validate our bend gesture

set would be to test compound applications with four action

pairs or more. Finally, it would be interesting to perform a

follow-up study that compares user generated bend gestures

mappings with those produced by designers [15].

 

[Black Rose]

I prefer the squirrel phone from 2005

 

 

 

[Crests]

omg