Canadian Researchers Designed A Paper-Thin Bending Mobile Phone Concept

When our smartphones are put in silent mode, they can only vibrate or give a low volume beep to indicate a new call, but it may happen that a user misses these signals and as a result misses important calls. Canadian researchers from Queen’s University working for British company Plastic Logic (dealing with plastic electronics) have designed a smart device that would change its shape to indicate incoming calls and notification. This paper-thin device is a flexible electrophoretic display, called MorePhone. It has embedded alloy wires that pull and tug at the screen to allow it to display notifications by curling up. The mobile phone features a thin plastic display and ‘smart memory’ wires that curl up a single corner of the device or as many as three corners to signify incoming calls to notifications. Users can also customize curling patterns so that the curling up of individual corners indicates different notifications. Users can also customize the display to show curls bending up and down when an urgent message is received. Flexible display technologies and smartphones based on thin film can provide radically new techniques of interaction that would be totally different from what our regular devices provide right now. Researchers plan to launch this technology into the market within the next 5 years.