New Canadian tech enables video clip to play on your Coke can

It sounds like something out of Star Trek - morphing displays that can change shape or form, be wrapped around a pop can, worn like a shirt or rolled up and slipped into your pocket. But these displays may soon be available, and put to a variety of uses - thanks to contributions by Canadian researchers.
6/10/2008 6:00:00 AM By: Grant Buckler

Flexible displays might also be incorporated in clothing. T-shirts with ever-changing slogans are one possible application, and of course advertising comes to mind. But there might be more serious uses. Human Media Lab researcher Phil Horwitz suggests patients in hospitals might have vital health information displayed on their hospital gowns or blankets so doctors wouldn't have to thumb through charts.

In another demo, Vertegaal shows how an electronic design workbench using flexible display technology could allow engineers to pick components from a menu and attach them to a three-dimensional model – essentially a block of Styrofoam covered with flexible display material. Picking parts from a screen with a hand gesture, he adds them to a plain white block to create a mockup of an iPod.

In the June issue of the journal Communications of the ACM, published by the Association for Computing Machinery, Vertegaal and media lab researcher David Holman outline these projects and other possible uses for flexible displays as part of a special section on organic user interfaces.

Vertegaal expects the first flexible e-book readers to appear within a year, and predicts flexible screens will overtake flat screens in the market in 15 to 20 years “unless we run out of oil – which is conceivable – because all these things are made out of oil.”

“This is not short-term change,” agrees Carmi Levy, vice-president of strategic consulting at AR Communications in Toronto. “This is long-term change.” But Levy says the work at Queen's is well timed because flexible displays are poised to become reality. Today's displays, he says, “are fairly fragile, expensive and power hungry, and that limits where we can use them”

Levy says flexible displays would reduce worries about dropping electronic devices, and their ability to change shape will eliminate limits they place on miniaturization.

You could, for instance, have a touch screen the size of an ordinary sheet of paper that could be rolled up and slipped into a pocket. “We're going to go back to the scroll,” Vertegaal observes.

The Human Media Lab hopes soon to embark on a research project with Sony Corp. and follow up its simulations by working with real flexible display technology. And in case there's any need to draw attention to the role of Canadian researchers in the technology's development, “we're not hung up on the Coke can,” Vertegaal says. “it could be a Tim Horton's cup.”

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