At the cornerstone of any good company or economy for that matter is efficiency. At Queens University in Ontario Canada researchers have come up with the ultra thin, ultra light weight, flexible plastic displays called PaperTab, a high resolution, 11 inch touch screen display with built-in electronics. The creator, Plastic Logic, incubated at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Lab, is now a world renowned creator of a stream of technological innovations in flexible displays.
The key difference is flexibility: there is a possibility of a wide range of applications that would not be possible with glass-based displays. Expected applications include mobile devices, billboards, reading devices, art applications, and more.
The device runs on the Intel core i5 processor and employs a sensor material instead of an electrophoretic display and looks like a sheet of paper in a clear plastic sleeve, but is in fact an interactive display . There are no mice or buttons and navigation is accomplished by finger swipes or simply bending the corner of the page up to go back or down to move forward.
A typical user would have any number of paper tabs, say 10, which are in effect like filing drawers. Applications run in each PaperTab, for example word-processing, gallery, image editor, etc. Information can be shared and transferred between PaperTabs using copy and paste commands or finger swipes. Uploading and downloading of files and videos wirelessly to and from multiple devices is a built in function.
Typical displays would be expected to last greater than five years and allow about 10 million page updates which is about the same yield as the LCD industry. Memory capacity is ample: 16 or 32 GB. The device currently comes with black or white plastic backing.
At 10 times thinner than its glass competitors , reading outside or at a ballgame, displaying signage, wearing a rolled tablet on the wrist, displaying artwork, all with a superlight interface is indeed an innovation.
