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PaperPhone: The Next Generation Smartphone?
June 1st, 2011
Technology, Usability, User Research
At the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems this past May, Dr. Roel Vertegaal, Director of Queen’s University Human Media Lab, and his team unveiled a prototype of the world’s next generation smartphone – the PaperPhone.
The PaperPhone is a thin, super lightweight flexible phone that uses an e-ink display. The phone will do everything that a smartphone currently does, but uses bending gestures as way to interact with the phone rather than swiping or tapping. The bend gestures will allow for the affordances that usually occur when someone is interacting with paper documents.
I’m not sure if I’m sold on the bend gestures as the way to navigate through ALL the tasks on the phone, but maybe it’s something that comes naturally to us or maybe we could learn just as we learned how to use the click wheel on the iPod back in the day.
They say this phone is only a few years away and will be just the start of a whole array of new products that are very lightweight and flexible.
Take a look at their videos and findings from their testing and research. What are your thoughts about the PaperPhone?
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Tags: e-ink, mobile, paperphone, smartphone
