PaperPhone, A Flexible Future For Smartphones And Tablets, To Be Demonstrated At Conference Today
A Canadian university scientist and inventor says the thin film phone he and his team have developed will make current smartphones obsolete within 5 to 10 years.
The world’s first interactive paper computer is set to revolutionize the world of interactive computing, according to its creator Dr. Roel Vertegaal, director of the Queen’s University Human Media Lab at Kingston, Ontario, Canada, who is currently an iPhone user.
“This is the future,” says Dr. Vertegaal, “Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years. This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen.”
Notwithstanding the many virtues of devices like the iPhone, iPad, other tablet computers, as well as dedicated e-readers like Amazon.com’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, they all share a rigid, amchine-like form factor with a plastic or metal feel. Personally I prefer ink-on-paper for relaxed and comfortable reading. Especially when reading for pleasure. I still subscribe to a hard-copy daily newspaper, and the ink-on-paper versions of five magazines. They’re more expensive than their corresponding e-editions, but I just prefer the friendly, flexible feel and heft of them.
Don’t get me wrong. I love digital devices as powerful creative tools, communication platforms, and information access, storage.and retrieval media, and I’m Internet-addicted, but for me the paradigmatic reading experience involves print on paper.
However, Dr. Vertegaal’s smartphone prototype, called PaperPhone, can be aptly described as a flexible iPhone. It does everything a smartphone does, such as store books, play music and even make phone calls. But instead of a rigid glass or plastic. its display consists of a 9.5 cm diagonal thin-film flexible E-Ink display. The flexible form of the display makes it much more portable than any current mobile computer. You can stuff it in your pocket and it’s also claimed to be much more durable than any current mobile phone, a point illustrated convincingly in a demonstration video in which a running PaperPhone’s screen is shown being beaten on vigorously with a mallet, and without so much as an image flicker. Now if they could just synthesize the texture and feel of paper!
And as one who still does a lot of rough draft composing with pen on paper, the PaperPhone’s potential to support user input via a standard pen as cited by Dr. Vertigaal is intrigueing.
The ability to store and interact with documents on larger versions of these light, flexible computers would also be a major step toward realization of the long-predicted but thus far elusive “paperless office.”
“The paperless office is here. Everything can be stored digitally and you can place these computers on top of each other just like a stack of paper, or throw them around the desk” says Dr. Vertegaal, noting that besides revolutionizing the world of mobile smartphones, this invention heralds a new generation of computers that are super-lightweight, thin-film in form factor, comfortably flexible, use no power when nobody is interacting with them, and when you are, don’t feel like you’re holding a slab of glass or metal.
Dr. Vertegaal unveils his paper computer to his scientific peers today (May 10) at 2 pm at the Association of Computing Machinery’s CHI 2011 (Computer Human Interaction) conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, — the field’s premier international event. An article on a study of interactive use of bending with flexible thinfilm computers is to be published at this conference, where the development group is also demonstrating a thinfilm wristband computer called “Snaplet.”
The PaperPhone development team also includes researchers Byron Lahey and Win Burleson of the Motivational Environments Research Group at Arizona State University (ASU), Audrey Girouard and Aneesh Tarun from the Human Media Lab at Queen’s University, Jann Kaminski and Nick Colaneri, director of ASU’s Flexible Display Center, and Seth Bishop and Michael McCreary, the VP R&D of E Ink Corporation.
You can find video PaperPhone demonstration here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl-qygUEE2c
A iSnaplet wristband computer video demo can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol_uu5pMmq8
You can download the PaperPhone ACM CHI 2011 Scientific Article in PDF format at:
http://bit.ly/jtOdaw
