Your smartphone’s display might be fairly large, but what if you could link up one or two additional panels to make it even bigger? It sure would make using a map a little easier — and a lot more like using the trusty old paper equivalent. And what if all those displays were power-sipping E Ink displays and let your phone run for days on end without needing a recharge?
Professor Roel Vertegaal and his Queen’s University students set out to create a device that packed some of the advantages of low-tech foldables like maps and books. The result is a prototype they call PaperFold. It’s a modular E Ink smartphone, but not in the way that Project Ara is modular. You don’t pop off the camera and click on an extra battery cell when you need more juice. PaperFold’s modularity is all about adapting what’s shown on the display to the way you configure its panels.
When you’re looking at your photo thumbnails, for example, you can click in a second panel to flip through full-sized images. A simple “page turn” motion cycles to the next image. Flipping PaperFold into a laptop shape causes a full QWERTY keyboard to appear on the bottom display for easy text input. Add a third panel, and it becomes a versatile E Ink map. Angle the side panels back slightly, and PaperFold automatically switches to Google Earth’s 3D view.
This is hardly the first flexible, paper-inspired device whipped up by the Human Media Lab at Queen’s. In 2013 they showed off both an 11-inch bendable tablet and a paper-thin smartphone that curls up like one of those plastic fortune-telling fish (or bacon, if you order them from ThinkGeek) when it receives a call.