Concept Readius is a prototype rollable e-document reader that offers a paper-like experience, the company says.Polymer Vision, a division of Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, recently announced a prototype rollable display technology that it calls Concept Readius. The company showed off the prototype this week during the Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) held in Berlin, Germany.
According to Polymer Vision, Readius is an e-document reader that has the ability to unfurl its display to a ratio much bigger than the reader itself. Readius uses a five-inch QVGA monitor and four gray levels to provide a reading experience that Polymer Vision says is on par with paper viewing. Polymer Vision said that it created Readius to prove that such a mobile device is viable and to obtain customer feedback at the IFA conference.
"Making displays thinner and flexible will have advantages in power and weight. But the only way to add the key advantage of size—allowing larger displays in smaller, pocket-size mobile devices—is by actually making the displays rollable," Polymer Vision CEO Karl McGoldrick said. "The Readius demonstrates this, as well as showing that we have taken this technology a major step further towards product and market."
Polymer Vision's press release for the Readius said that the company does not intend to commercialize this concept as a product in the e-paper space. Given that Fujitsu Ltd. announced last July that it had developed a bendable colored e-paper that would seem to compete with a technology like Readius, Polymer Vision's insistence that Readius is a demonstration device seems peculiar.
However, Richard Romano, a writer and analyst for TrendWatch Graphic Arts, said that he suspects that Polymer Vision is seeking partners to incorporate this technology into other products or to take the Readius concept to the next level.
"It seems like they see it as more than just a display technology—which it is—and need someone else to step up and give it a larger context. If it's going to become part of a Palm- or LifeDrive-like device, or an e-book reader, other companies will need to partner with [Polymer Vision] to add those other components or to license the technology," Romano said.
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"Philips' goal probably isn't to just throw a rollable display on the market and leave it at that. The real challenge is deciding what 'front end' to put on it," Romano said.
Romano went on to say that he foresees multiple ways in which Readius technology could be leveraged in the future, including the idea of having e-books, e-magazines and e-newspapers all connected to a universal Wi-Fi network that users could access with a Readius-type device. "Think about that it would be like to have a device that had the same essential form factor as a book, magazine, or newspaper, yet could access rich media dynamically like the Web," he said.
In addition, Romano said Readius could be used ultimately for any application that could access e-paper, including greeting cards, instruction manuals, product spec sheets that are updated automatically and electronically, brochures that incorporate rich media like video, audio, and animation, wall calendars and other hanging displays, packaging, labels and tags, maps and atlases that function like a GPS locator.
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