We’ve seen plenty of wild experimental smartphone concepts over the years but the new HoloFlex phone designed by Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab is something else. The phone combines 3D holographic images with a flexible display to create what might be a prototype for smartphones of the future.
The Human Media Lab explains that the HoloFlex is “is capable of rendering 3D images with motion parallax and stereoscopy to multiple simultaneous users without head tracking or glasses.” All images on the device’s display are “rendered into 12-pixel wide circular blocks rendering the full view of the 3D object from a particular viewpoint” so you can see every aspect of an object depending on the angle from which you’re looking at it.
The first thing you do upon developing a flexible holographic smartphone display? Fire up a game of Angry Birds, naturally. All the rest of that smartphone functionality can wait until you’ve finished a few rounds of slingshotting avian missiles.
Maybe it’s not the first thing — but it was clearly high on the list of the Human Media Labresearchers who developed the HoloFlex. And indeed, the game makes a pretty sizable cameo in the demo video for the new technology, which utilizes motion parallax and stereoscopy to render 3D images without the need for glasses.
The technology is built into a Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diode (FOLED) touchscreen that can be bent by the user. In addition to the oft-stated upsides of a bendy smartphone, a built-in bend sensor (similar to what the lab deployed in its recent ReFlex prototype) leverages the motion as another means with which to interact with the handset.
