MorePhone Bends and Twists When It Receives Text, Call

All eyes are on South Korean tech giants Samsung and LG which one will win the race to produce a smartphone with flexible screens.

However, a Canadian laboratory has actually made a prototype that bends and twists when it received a call or short messaging. The model is called MorePhone, made by researchers at the Human Media Lab of Queen's University.

"This is another step in the direction of radically new interaction techniques afforded by smartphones based on thin film, flexible display technologies," said Roel Vertegaal, the director of the Human Media Lab who developed the flexible PaperPhone and PaperTab.

"Others are familiar with hearing their phone ring or feeling it vibrates in silent mode. One of the problems with current silent forms of notification is that users often miss notifications when not holding their phones. With MorePhone, they can leave their smartphone on the table and observe visual shape changes when someone is trying to contact them," he explained.

The secret behind the unusual movements of the device is the use of thin, flexible electrophoretic display made by British firm Plastic Logic, considered a global leader in plastic electronics. The phone's displays are sandwiched beneath several shape memory alloy writes that contract when a call or text message comes in.

Phone owners can customise which part of the device would twist or bend to indicate if it is a call or text. One example is the top right corner of the MorePhone could bend upon receipt of an SMS, while for an email, it could be the bottom right corner. Calls that are more urgent could be seen by the repeated being up and down of corners.

The entire body of the device or up to three individual corners could curl.

Techies could view the prototype at the ACM CHI 2013 (Computer-Human Interaction) on Monday, April 29, in Paris, France, at the yearly gathering of the world's top conference on all areas of human-computer interaction.

Mr Vertegaal, who co-developed MorePhone with School of Computer students Antonio Gomes and Andrea Nesbitt, estimated it would take 5 to 10 more years before the bending and twisting phone would reach consumers for commercial distribution.