The PaperFold, a smartphone that can be folded and unfolded, was presented at the ACM CHI 2014 conference in Toronto by researchers at Queen's University's Human Media Lab.
This smartphone allows the user to “unfold” up to three electrophoretic displays to provide a larger viewing area when needed. The displays can be detached, so that the user can take a device of the size they determine.
“In PaperFold, each display can operate independently or as part of a unified system,” says Dr. Roel Vertegaal, professor in the School of Computing and director of the Human Media Lab. “It allows for multiple form factors, providing support for mobile tasks that require large screens or on-demand keyboards, while remaining compact, thin, and light.”
PaperFold autonomously perceives its shape and changes its graphics to provide different functions depending on its changes. For example, folding the device into an ultra notebook format activates a keyboard on the bottom screen. The user can also, by bringing all three screens in a straight line, display a map that “captures” all three, while if they give them a curved/spherical shape, they can see the map in Google Earth view.
The inspiration for PaperFold, as the name suggests, came from paper. “The development of electronic paper computers with similar properties to paper has long been a research goal in our group,” says Dr. Vertegaal. “Books use folding as both a navigation technique and a space-saving method, and paper maps have small ‘screen’ sizes. PaperFold takes folding techniques that make paper versatile, and uses them to change the look or function of a smartphone, as well as to change the display surface in a flexible way.”
Source: exedra.gr
