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Canadian Researchers Debut PaperTab, the Paper-Thin Tablet
redletterdave writes "The PaperTab, which looks and feels just like a sheet of paper, may one day overtake today's tablet. Developed by researchers at the Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, the PaperTab features a flexible, high-resolution 10.7-inch plastic touchscreen display built by Plastic Logic, the company borne from Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, and relies on a second-generation Intel Core i5 processor to turn what looks like a sheet of white paper into a living, interactive display. Unlike typical tablets akin to Apple's iPad, the idea of PaperTab is to use one app at a time, per PaperTab. To make tasks easier, users would own 10 or more PaperTabs at once and lay them out to their liking; with multiple tablets to separate your applications, PaperTab relies on an interface that allows you to combine and merge elements from disparate applications with intuitive dragging, dropping, pointing, and folding."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81iiGWdsJgg&feature=player_embedded
Only paper with rounded corners.
Ahhhh. Papercut!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
the Paper-Thin Tablet
But sir, it's paper-thin.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
where do you put the battery, where do you put the wifi or cel hardware, where do you put the cpu that is currently sitting on the floor, why does my 800mhz rooted nook simple touch have a faster touch response than an i5?
We've had nice paper thin displays for years now. But a thin display doesn't mean a thin tablet. Until we have thin CPUs and thin RAM sticks, and thin flash memory and thin connectors, we aren't going to have a paper thin tablet.
When you get all the components you need for a tablet you end up with something just as thick as what we've got on shelves today. By no means thick, but not paper-thin.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Since the douchetard du jour forgot to, I guess it's up to old Anonymous Cowherd to link to the actual website (rather than the warmed-over blogruel we were served):
http://www.humanmedialab.org/papertab
You can thank me by clicking 'reply' and composing a note of thanks.
Mind you what they're showing obviously appears to be a prototype; a proof-of-concept.
I imagine that if this thing were to hit production that it would definitely improve; thinner consolidated cables (if any), faster refresh rate, etc..
It might not exactly be bleeding edge but it's very promising!
They're thinking of the retail packaging all those chips come in. The actual chips are far thinner than paper. Copier paper, for example, is about 100 microns. Chips were 7 microns in 2006. I don't know how much thinner they can be today.
Intel normally puts a CPU in a casing big enough to handle because there's no reason to make it thinner then paper, but that's just packaging. There's no reason flash memory or other clips couldn't be put in thinner packages. Remember microSD cards containing flash chips have been around since 2005. In 2006, Sandisk sold a 2GB microsd card barely thicker than the plastic packaging.
"since the day they were born in the lab, but there is more to a computer than its display, wheres the flexible and paper thin battery, the flexible core i5, the flexible ram rom and flash?"
They are in the basement computer, doing all the work and sending the result to the screen, like ...how would you call it... a thin client. :-)
do you prefer to dig though a mile long start menu or do you like clicking that little search box on windows and type in device ma enter?
they are offering the mile long start menu, where is that document I wanted, oh its over here, now lets open it, move it, embed it, put it away and send an email
systems we have now, let the computer find it, attach, done.
Sure, it's cool that it's paper thin... but a) it's black and white, not color; and b) the refresh rate, if the video is any indication, seems abysmal for anything but static displays.
Can somebody please tell me what possible advantage this has over an e-ink reader?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Oh, cool! So the thin client doesn't even need a battery?
http://memegenerator.net/instance/24860964
[Get called fat lazy and stupid by other countries; beat them at the olympics and land on Mars]
The wires are what lets them do it.
Basically each 'tablet' is just a display, with all other hardware removed. The wires are connected to an actual CPU, which does all the processing, etc.
In other words, these guys bought a display and wired it up. Woohoo.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
..on paper.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I prefer a different concept - one where humans are augmented and become superhuman rather than merely the environment becoming magical.
;).
For example, cameras+ wearable displays + brain-computer interfaces. Control by special gloves, eye-blink gestures, and/or thought-macros. Then the "screen" can be pretty big even though it is physically small and doesn't consume as much power as a huge display.
Once you have that, you have virtual eidetic memory, virtual telepathy and telekinesis. Most of the tech is there or nearly there. One of the major problems might actually be Copyright Law - it conflicts with having eidetic memory especially if you want to share it with others. The **AA won't be happy with a penny for your thoughts, or their thoughts
Permanent video+audio recording at low/mid res, with high def/res in a ring buffer (past X minutes), so you can have the past X minutes in high def if you need it for whatever reason. Configurable image and audio recognition. Context awareness (time + location+ surroundings+ history) + super PDA features.
Military edition might have gun muzzle detection, camouflage countermeasures, automatic "crack-thump" sniper location, UWB radar+comms, range gated vision (the latter two can give away your position to enemies that are suitably equipped[1]).
[1] That said, electronic devices emit signals that can be detected if you have enough fancy stuff.
The display seems pretty large. Does this mean we are finally going to get proper devices for reading PDFs?
Including a processor on the backside of the PaperTab wouldn't likely be a huge problem, as there are multiple research groups investigating ultralow-power, flexible, organic electronics, e.g.,
G. H. Gelinck, et al., "Flexible active matrix displays and shift registers based on solution-processed organic transistors", Nature Mater., 3: 106, 2004
K. Nomura, et al., "Room-temperature fabrication of transparent flexible thin-film transistors using amorphous oxide semiconductors", Nature, 432: 488-492, 2004
B. Yoo, et al., "High-performance solution-deposited n-channel organic transistors and their complementary circuits", Adv. Mater., 19: 4028, 2007
H. Klauk, et al., "Ultralow-power organic complementary circuits", Nature, 445: 745, 2007
W. Xiong, et al., "A 3-V, 6-bit C-2C digital-to-analog converter using complementary organic thin-film transistors on glass", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 45: 1380-1388, 2010
H. Marien, et al., "A fully integrated delta sigma ADC in organic thin-film transistor technology on flexible plastic foil", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 46: 276-284, 2011
K. Myny, et al., "Unipolar organic transistor circuits made robust by dual-gate technology", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 46: 1223-1230, 2011
K. Myny, et al., "An 8-bit, 40-instructions-per-second organic microprocessor on plastic foil", IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, 47: 284-291, 2012
Beyond that, there are already flexible batteries on the market.
Even better, this could lead to wallpaper actually stuck onto a wall. Except more useful as the number of pixels would finally be sufficient for most purposes.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Couple of hundred of these bound together in a hardback cover, maybe with a processor and memory in the spine, maybe just a connector.
Kindle is great for fiction, which is linear, but less good for reference books where you often want to flip back and forwards etc.
Now you can have the space advantages of ebooks with the UI advantages of a proper book.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
They aren't even close to being paper thin, and never will be (for useful output).