Building on its leading position in rollable displays and drawing on its considerable heritage in personal electronics, Philips Polymer Vision is revealing its Concept Readius at the Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) in Berlin, Germany, September 2-7. Philips Concept Readius is a prototype of a connected consumer device for business professionals unwilling to sacrifice readability, mobility, performance, or weight in a pocket-sized, e-reader concept.
Polymer Vision does not intend to commercialize this concept as a product in the market. Instead, it is demonstrating the fitness of its rollable displays for use in the mobile devices of tomorrow.
The Readius is the world’s first prototype of a functional electronic-document reader that can unroll its display to a scale larger than the device itself. With four gray levels, the monochrome, 5-inch QVGA (320 pixels x 240 pixels) display provides paper-like viewing comfort with a high contrast ratio for reading-intensive applications, including text, graphics, and electronic maps. Using a bi-stable electrophoretic display effect from E Ink Corp., the display consumes little power and is easy to read, even in bright daylight. Once the user has finished reading, the display can be rolled back into the pocket-size (100 mm x 60 mm x 20 mm) device.
Based on Philips Polymer Vision’s PV-QML5 rollable display reference design, the Readius was created in order to demonstrate the viability of the rollable-display concept in mobile applications and to gain customer feedback at the IFA 2005.
“Making displays thinner and flexible will have advantages in power and weight. But the only way to add the key advantage of size—allowing larger displays in smaller, pocket-size mobile devices—is by actually making the displays rollable,” says Polymer Vision CEO Karl McGoldrick in the press release. “The Readius demonstrates this, as well as showing that we have taken this technology a major step further towards product and market.
More info here.
way cool!
Like that mars movie with Val Kilmer, where he takes out the map and pull out more area. Very cool indeed.
not all that impressed. i’m waiting for that virtual screen that Tom Cruise used in the movie Minority Report. but i guess this is a step in the right direction.
Man, I’ve been thinking about that for laptops for years. I should have patented my idea.
that is cool!!
Now we can have a iPod video!
I want one as soon as it goes to market. What a great way to read on the go.
Looks highly breakable.
Now we can have a iPod video!
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Very smart
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Years ago I imagined a calapsable kiosk with this type of technology… friends called me nuts… hah, hey wait a minute, one of my friends works for Philips! Damn!!!
I can’t remember how many years ago, probably 6 or 7.
http://www.grapegraphics.com/media/kiosk.mov
Jb
your next subscription newspaper/magazine,
I’m waiting for ‘Movie in a Can’, you just spray it on your eyeballs.
Send money to the Red Cross. Just do it.
Awesome!!!!
I can imagine displays like these being used on store shelves to display different prices depending on what products are placed on them. \
Exactly what I thought, Ray.
Magic Word: cases, as in iPod cases would be harder to build for this.
down the road: an interactive touchscreen
strangely enough, there was a sci-fi show that started about ten years ago, orginally developed by Gene Roddenberry of StarTrek fame, called Earth: Final Conflict. they used devices remarkably similar to this in design and function, of course with colour, video phone, maps, etc. the called them Globals. One smart phone.
It’s like déja vu looking at these things. Cool!
MW-taking as in taking a cue from Sci-Fi!
“what the mind can conceive, man can achieve”
What only black & white. How primitive.
Imagine something like this built into something like the Mac mini, or even a video iPod (if there is such a thing.
Even as a pull down from the ceiling television type thingy.
As dumb as humans can be sometimes we can be pretty clever as well.
I’m not going to add anything else that other forward thinkers have already touched on (i.e. downloadable video, newspapers, books etc.) My only comment is to those nay sayers who comment on it’s apparent flimsiness, or that it’s display is in mono.
Look guys this is a first generation ground breaker and there is a long way to go with this technology. So we should all kick back and watch the development of it. In a few years this will be truly unbelievable.
“In a few years this will be truly unbelievable”
providing Apple has something to do with it of course
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Someone beat me to it…
I was going to comment that it looks a lot like a “Global” from Earth: Final Conflict.
And yeah, down the road, we’ll have colour, wireless capabilities, GPS, all kinds of gizmos!
I want one (c:
mattyg:
“Good artists borrow, Great artists steal.”
-Pablo Picaso
Apple utilize other peoples ideas in order to create better, more useful creations. Kind of like Ferrari using other people’s tires to keep there beautiful, powerful cars off of the ground.
M$ just steals ideas to cram into their bloat/vaporware!
This is indeed very cool…I can see many applications for this technology, some that may come to Apple products.