Flexiphone , The Dream of Smartphone , Coming Soon

The cracked smartphone screen could be a thing of the past thanks to the research of the Canadian university. 

The Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario has revealed their design for a flexible, unbreakable smartphone, and the phone’s flexibility will provide the users with a new way to control applications. ROEL VERTEGAAL: ReFlex consists of very very thin flexible screen. It’s very very bendable, and behind the screen is a bend sensor and this bend sensor registers the shape of the phone, and this is then used as input. The problem is that regular smartphones are rigid and they do not allow you to interact with the third dimension. You can input an X coordinate and a Y coordinate through touch but you cannot input the Z coordinate which goes in that dimension, and this is used for example in navigating books. When you crack a book cover, you feel the force of the book in your hands pushing back and as you push it more, the pages flick faster.

 So you get an idea of the rate of change. Also you feel the pages flick through your fingers. So as you are navigating through that third dimension, you really get a good sense of where you are in the book and this is one of the things that we’re trying to achieve. COMM: The tactile nature of the experience is increased by the phone’s voice coil, which transmits variable low frequency vibrations to the user's fingers. ROEL VERTEGAAL: Very interesting package that allows you to really sense interactions in 3D. COMM: But to get to this point has taken many years and several prototypes. ROEL VERTEGAAL: We’ve been working on this technology for about 12 years now. In 2004, we put out a project called Paper Windows where we simulated the use of flexible displays by projecting on the pieces of paper off which we measured the orientation shape and location so that we can simulate this experience of the paper computer, and we’ve been working on this ever since. And in 2011 we put our Paper Phone, which was the world’s first flexible smartphone and using E Ink screen, but it was still tethered to a computer. So this is the first wireless full colour, full motion, high res flexible smartphone. COMM: The bendy phone could be in your hands sooner than you think. ROEL VERTEGAAL: ReFlex is going to revolutionise the smartphone market.


 We’ve had many enquiries about productising this phone, and we believe that this will in fact happen. And given that this prototype is almost market ready, we believe that this is gonna change everything very very shortly.