Over the years, we have seen some amazing technology, however, nothing is in comparison to a bendable smart phone. This can assist in eliminating cracked and broken screens from the device being stored in your pocket.
While this smartphone is only a prototype, which the company responsible has named it “Reflex,” the academics at the Queen’s University who designed it have invented the bendable screen to integrate into a mobile OS Design. The researchers working on the new project have also created the phone with a full 720P LG Flexible OLED touch-screen. The phone uses Android’s KitKat, and even includes a haptic actuator to detect the phone bending in order to provide proper feedback to the user.
This is the result of a phone that can bend not only due to the fact it is awesome, but due to the amount of usefulness that it possess. Roel Vertegaal, a researcher on the project provided a statement saying “This represents a completely new way of physical interaction with flexible smartphones.” He continues describing the phone, “When this smartphone is bent down on the right, pages flip through the fingers from right to left, just like they would in a book. More extreme bends speed up the page flips. Users can feel the sensation of the moving through their fingertips via a detailed vibrations of the display…Combined with the passive force feedback felt when bending the display, this allows for a highly realistic simulation of physical forces when interacting with virtual objects.”
While a new way of flicking through your favorite books in a new digital way is dawning upon us; informing the digital device to select and press the various options from the screen, this new panel is also introducing a new way to play the popular hit game Angry Birds. By being able to bend the phone, the force of the slingshot combined to the angle height can also be set, before the bird is then tossed through its destructive path.
“The combination of bending, active haptic feedback, and different input-to-cursor mappings allowed us to create an extremely expressive device,” the researchers wrote in their paper ReFlex: A Flexible Smartphone with Active Haptic Feedback for Bend Input.
Other than using the futuristic device to play games and reading your favorite e-Books, the researchers also believe that there are more greater uses for this new line of technology. In particular, being able to navigate through a long list of various opened websites. However, those who are awaiting for the newest iPhone or the next Android Deice to be controlled by the ability to bend, will have to wait.
However, bendable and even foldable phones have in fact been demonstrated for some years now; the technology is just at the tip of the iceberg. The new LG’s G Flex2 is only one of a several curved smartphones that are produced by the company. The competitive Samsung has also previously aired some similar concepts of a foldable phone, as well as the flexible morphees – another idea for their bendable phones. However, the reality still counters the inflexible batteries inside these phones and the hard shell cases that come with the phone, or at least at this point in time. As new research is developed, we can see everyone possessing their own flex phone before too long.
Sources: Wired, AngryBird, YouTube, SquareSpace, LGFlex2
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