Flexible Toshiba LCD Zooms In When Bent

Touch input has become quite widespread, especially on the consumer electronics front, where handsets and smarpthones, among other things, often forgo a keyboard completely. Even so, however, end-users and manufacturers alike crave for an even more direct control method, which is why various types of display concepts have arisen over time. Most often, the method of input needs the user to get up close and personal, and Toshiba's newest invention in this area follows the same basic principle.

But there is nothing basic about the display itself. Instead of showcasing just another type of touchscreen with or without unlimited input support, the hardware developer came up with a unique way of interacting. To be precise, Toshiba demoed a thin and flexible liquid crystal display (LCD) panel armed with a bend sensor.

As consumers have probably guessed, the bend sensor is the key element. The display itself, with its glass substrate of just 0.1mm, can be bent to a curvature radius of 50mm. This is possible because of a specially-developed thin backlight unit.

Basically, bending the screen sends the commands to zoom in and out, depending on whether the screen itself is bent inward or outward. This capability was even demonstrated at SID 2010, where it was shown how Google Earth would zoom in and out of an aerial photograph.

The bend sensor is commercially available and works in this fashion because its resistance value changes depending on how it is bent itself. Thus, it was mounted at the end of the backlight unit. As for the panel itself, it had an SVGA resolution of 800 x 600 pixels and a diagonal of 8.4 inches. For now, there is no word on when, if ever, this technology will spawn commercially-available products, though Tech-On reports that many engineers were intrigued by the idea.