“Papertab” – The World’s First (Fully Working) Paper-Thin Display – [VIDEO]

As the Consumer Electronics Show continues to amaze us with its (seemingly never-ending) cutting-edge product announcements, Stuff Magazine reports this week that researchers at Queen’s University in Canada have, in fact, created a fully-working, paper-thin display.

The display is 10.7-inches in size and is fully capable of displaying all the types of media we consume today — documents, photos, and even video. The display uses e-ink technology and a flexible sheet of plastic to ensure the user can bend the display from end-to-end.

From the report:

Bending the corner up or down allows you to “turn” pages back and forward, which is nice, but perhaps more interesting is the idea of combining multiple Papertabs (ten and upwards), with each showing different documents or running different apps. The Papertabs are designed to keep track of their location relative to other Papertabs, so you can show larger images by putting one next to another and having the image display across both.

As for how it’s powered? – An Intel Core i5 processor. Now, before your mouth drops to the floor, … that’s not actually contained inside in the “Papertab” itself. Instead, the report notes that, (in its current iteration), the “Papertab” must currently be plugged-in before you can use it.

Looking to the future, though, Research assistant at Arizona State University, Ryan Brotman, believes that, most of the devices we know as ‘computers’ today, will look like PaperTab — “within five to ten years.”

That’s a wildly exciting thought.

/ Stuff