Bendable mobile devices may be widely available in 5 years, depending on demand

Flat, paper-like mobile devices that can be rolled up, packed away like deck of cards, or spread out on a desk to form a single screen. It's the future. At least Roel Vertegaal sees it that way. The professor of human-computer interaction believes the devices could be here within half a decade, he says, and he and his colleagues at Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab are trying to make it a reality. They’ve developed the MorePhone, which changes shape to let users know they have a notification, as well as the bendable, flexible PaperPhone smartphone and PaperTab tablet. “Within three years, I think, we’ll have first gen flexible devices, and within five years, I think they’ll be widely available,” said Antonio Gomes, a PhD candidate at the Human Media Lab, which receives funding from Queen’s and federal agency the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and uses hardware provided by Plastic Logic Ltd. The devices developed at the lab are lightweight. Users can carry multiples of 10 flexible tablets instead of one iPad. “You can stick them in your briefcase like you used to with paper,” said Vertegaal, the director of the lab. The displays communicate with each other and track each other’s locations, he said. If one is used as an email inbox, a user could read an email on a second display by picking it up and pointing it toward the email the user would like to read. “It’s more as if the computer tablets become windows, so they work very much like windows on a laptop or desktop system,” Vertegaal said in a phone interview. Users could send an email by simply bending a corner of the device, and carry around sets of “paper” mobile devices in a pocket. “It’s like having a set of cards in your pocket … One will be your email inbox, and if there’s an email, it will vibrate. Another will be, maybe, your text messaging, and if there’s a text message, it will vibrate,” he said. Users could also have one notification for all their devices, which could be signaled silently by the phone physically changing shape, like bending corners, Gomes said. There are limitations to the electrophoretic technology used for these devices, says Duncan Stewart, director of technology, media and telecom at Deloitte Canada. The resolution is not nearly as good as that of LCD screens, he said in an interview. Measured in pixels per inch, it’s “probably less than half as good as a cutting edge LCD,” and it’s not clear how fast that will improve, he said. Stewart said the bendable material is also not as bright because it doesn’t have a backlight, and though it works well in black and white, it doesn’t offer colour. “That’s just a limitation that is unlikely to ever change. You will never have a saturated, rich colour experience with this technology … It’s just the way electrophoretic works,” Stewart said. Another feature that the technology cannot support is video capabilites above 10 or 20 frames per second, he said. While the devices developed at the Human Media Lab are bendable, they're not foldable. Still, the team is working on that, Vertegaal said in a follow-up email. If users could someday fold their mobile devices like a map, “that will change things,” Stewart said, adding that he doesn’t believe that's currently possible and may never be. Since its founding in 2000, the lab has developed technologies that have made their way into the market. Those include eye-tracking technology that can detect when a user looks away from a device, a feature that’s now available on SamsungElectronics Co. Ltd.’s Galaxy S4 and LG Corp.'s Optimus G Pro, Vertegaal said. “That feature is something that came out of our lab 10 years ago,” Vertegaal said, adding that Samsung, using the lab's technology, has been working on commercializing a flexible smartphone and has unveiled a smartphone prototype called Yuom. “By seeding the seeds of these new ways of thinking about interacting with systems, you create a market for them, and then basically the future happens,” he said. How widely used the technology becomes will largely depend on consumer demand. “The problem, when you are attempting to assess the likely disruptive impact of any new technology, is not, 'is it possible,' but 'is it desirable,'” Stewart said. A smartphone customer today, he pointed out, tends to be concerned with issues like battery life, functionality in direct sunlight, and quality of cameras. “The ability to fold my phone in half wouldn’t make my, or most people’s, top 100 list,” Steward said. He said there are many niches the technology could fill, such as a curved touch display that wraps around the outside of a pillar, on which advertising could run. “Will this, on the other hand, become the future of all tablets and smartphones?” he asked. “At this point, and based on my assessment of the technology, that looks extremely unlikely.” Should the technology become ubiquitous, Vertegaal said, it could alter the way customers use their mobile devices, and “play into the Internet of things, where each object that you have has an Internet connection.” Vertegaal also expects the flexible device technology to be cheap, eventually costing around $25 per device, a fraction of the price that a smartphone commands today, though he said companies that make the devices will still profit because customers will buy multiples. “People might buy a 10 pack of these, so that means they’re still shelling out $250,” he said. —With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Simon Doyle at sdoyle@thewirereport.ca

Bendable mobile devices may be widely available in 5 years, depending on demand

Broadcast | July 3, 2013

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