The flexible display is a technology that’s really started to come into its own in the past several years, and printed electronics are keeping pace. The two naturally complement each other, and PrintScreen, a customizable thin-film touch display, is among the latest and most promising combinations. It is a digital fabrication of a super-thin flexible touch screen that allows even unskilled people to print custom flexible displays.

PrintScreen is the result of a collaboration between Simon Olberding, Michael Wessley, and Jürgen Steimle. The team chose to use electroluminescent phosphoric ink, a material that requires very little power to use and boasts a long life. It’s resilient to bending and manipulation, making it ideal for flexible displays.

The process starts with creating an image in any vector graphics program. The displays are fabricated using four layers printed on top of each other: a silver conductor, the dielectric (an electrical insulator that can be polarized when an electric field is applied), the phosphor (the aforementioned electroluminescent ink), and a translucent conductor. This process is normally carried out by screen printing.

The display can then be printed on a substrate. Because of the unique qualities of the flexible displays, there are very few limits in the type of substrate used, provided it is smooth. The displays can be printed onto paper, ceramic, leather, wood, plastic, and many more. They can also easily be made into touch sensors without the need for an additional overlay.

The team behind PrintScreen also came up with a method of instantly printing the displays with an inkjet printer. It would use paper that has already been prepared with all of the printed layers except for the ink. A normal inkjet printer is loaded with the electroluminescent ink and prints the design right onto the prepared display for an instant customized object.

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Our contemporary technology tends to center on touchscreens, which present us with flat, pixellated versions of ideas and objects. The future of user interfaces could be much more tangible thanks to MiT’s inFORM, a shapeshifting display that lets users interact on both digital and physical planes.

The inFORM looks a lot like the pinscreen toys that used to adorn executives’ desks. Each individual “pin” is attached to a motor. The pins can move to represent digital objects physically, and they can also interact with physical objects, even when the user is far, far away.

The device can be reasonably compared to a computer monitor that displays not flat images, but dynamic, moving shapes. Two users on opposite ends of the system could play catch with one another or even perform complex actions like high fives or even handshakes.

Users can even create and manipulate their own shapes limited only by the number of pins  on the board. The concept is a beautiful example of interactive design and may be an early glimpse of the future of computing.

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Curve, bend and get wet – words not often applied to the world of energy storage. LG Chem, however, is already mass-producing batteries that can achieve all of the aforementioned actions. Before you ask why, plenty of consumer devices already feature bendable screens.

Taking the traditional shape and bulk out of the batteries that power our favorite devices means that designers are almost entirely free to rethink gadget designs. E-readers, wearable technology, and bendable cell phone screens are all firmly within reach with batteries that bend and move freely.

LG Chem is serious about their new developments, as they are beginning the mass production of these remarkable batteries. They’ve even created a cable-like battery that can be tied in knots or submerged in water. Next-generation device implementation will quickly follow, creating numerous answers for battery space problems.

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It’s been a long time coming, and now it looks like the age of the flexible OLED screen smartphone is just about here. In 2011 two different manufacturers came out with concepts for flexible, bendable phones that are unlike anything we’ve seen until now. Both of the concepts are totally amazing, but neither is quite ready for store shelves just yet.

Samsung’s Galaxy Skin is sleek, bendy, ultra-thin and virtually indestructible. The AMOLED screen can be manipulated into tons of different configurations for talking, time-keeping, listening to music, watching movies and probably a hundred other things.

The Galaxy Skin concept is the product of designer Keyon You. Although Samsung showed off a very cool physical mockup of the phone at CES 2011 there’s no release date for it yet.

The other flexible phone design getting a lot of attention right now is Nokia’s HumanForm. It does not – despite its name – have the form of a human. It’s actually a teardrop-shaped thing with a touch screen the size of the entire phone. The phone design itself is just so-so, but the kinetic interface shown in the video below is completely bananas.

Twisting, folding, shaking, and otherwise manipulating the phone itself – rather than just some abstract buttons on a screen – sounds like a pretty good way to get out the frustrations of the day. Will we ever get to play with a phone like this in everyday life? Probably not in the next few years, but the time of the AMOLED phones is coming – and it’s going to be a bendy ride.

The post The Twisty Future of Calling: 2 Stunning Flexible Phones first appeared on Gajitz.

It’s often the more fantastical designs that catch our eyes and make us dream of a technology-filled future. The “Integral Cord” concept from Raphael Lang, Yu-Lin Hou and Stephen Chan Win Tak is an exciting idea that may not be entirely possible with today’s technology but gives an enticing view of the type of flexible gadget we may carry around in the future.

The design earned the runner-up award in the Lifebook category of the FUJITSU Design Award: A Life With Future Computing competition, organized by Designboom in collaboration with FUJITSU. The Integral Cord design is both deceptively minimalistic and cleverly packed with functionality.

The cord’s length is packed with laser LED arrays and camera arrays that both create a flexible display and allow the device to recognize where the user’s finger are at any given moment. Because the cord is flexible, it can be manipulated into a vast variety of shapes and sizes.

When it is moved, twisted and manipulated, the Integral Cord can create several different displays at once. The LEDs criss-cross inside the loops to create a visible pixel at every point of intersection. Several of the devices can be connected to create gigantic super-size displays, multiple connected screens, or even a projected image – or one cord can be coiled to create a very small and inconspicuous display.

Thanks to the integrated cameras, the Integral Cord can do more than just show pictures. When shaped into a loop, it acts as a scanner as an object is passed through the loop. Transferring files from one system to the next is as easy as bringing a file up on one loop display and using a finger to “push” it through to the other loop.

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