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Extra-thin LEDs put a screen on your skin
Eventually, wearable displays might be so thin that they effectively blend into your skin. University of Tokyo researchers have developed an optoelectronic skin whose polymer LEDs and organic photodetectors are so thin (3 micrometers) that they practically blend in with your body. If it weren't for the thin film needed to attach the display in the first place, it'd look like a tattoo. The technology more efficient than previous attempts at these skins, running several days at a time, and it's durable enough that it won't break as you flex your limbs.
Flexible smartphones may be coming sooner than you think
Companies have been promising us futuristic, paper-like displays since forever, but so far we remain unimpressed. The ReFlex, a prototype flexible smartphone from Queens University is tantalizingly close to what we've been waiting for, though. To build it, the team mated a 720p flexible LG OLED display to bend sensors and haptic feedback motors. Powering the device is an Android 4.4-powered board, complete with custom drivers, placed in the non-flexible part beside the display.
Stretchable square of rubber doubles as a keyboard
There's a whole branch of science that's dedicated to turning flexible surfaces into sensors that can be used as an artificial substitute for skin. These materials could then be used to give robots a sense of touch, or even to restore feeling for people with artificial prostheses. Researchers at the University of Auckland have taken the concept in a slightly different direction after building a square of soft, stretchable rubber that pulls double-duty as a keyboard. It's hoped that the technology can be used to create foldable, rollable input devices, which reminds us of Nokia's twisty-stretchy phone concept from way back when.
Flexible phone concept bends to control apps
This phone has a bendable screen, and it isn't just for show: it's equipped with a bending sensor and can actually be used as a form of input, like a stylus or your fingers on touchscreen displays. Our colleagues at Engadget Chinese got a chance to check the concept out at Touch Taiwan 2015, where it was being showcased by local manufacturer AUO. The company claims the device and its 5-inch, 1,280 x 720 AMOLED screen is unbreakable -- true or not, it does look a lot more pliable than, say, the LG G Flex 2, as you can see in the GIF after the break.
LG bets big on flexible displays for cars and phones
More and more smartphones, TVs and wearables like Apple's Watch now use OLED displays, but only two companies mass produce them -- Samsung and LG. LG is trying to stay on top of demand by building a new 1.05 trillion won ($900 million) flexible OLED plant in Korea. Starting in 2017, the 6th-gen line will spit out four times as many screens as the current-gen plant thanks to a larger "substrate" sheet size. The plastic-based displays are aimed at smaller next-gen devices that can benefit from the bendability like automotive displays, cellphones and wearables.
Flexible fiber implants treat your brain without hurting it
Brain implants are limited right now -- they typically measure just one thing at a time, and their stiff wiring can wreck tissue if the device stays in place for long enough. Neither of those problems will matter if MIT's flexible fiber implant becomes a practical reality, though. The school's researchers have developed very thin (almost nanoscale), flexible polymer fibers that have customizable channels for carrying chemicals, electricity and light. These strands could not only treat a patient with drugs and light stimulation, but measure the response with electrodes; you'd know whether or not your medicine is working. The bendy, unintrusive design should also be safe for your body, making it possible to tackle long-term illnesses.
Flexible spinal cord implants will let paralyzed people walk
Doctors dream of helping the paralzyed walk through implants that stimulate their spinal cords, but current technology makes that impossible; these stiff, unnatural gadgets usually end up damaging or inflaming nervous tissue over time. Swiss researchers may have just solved this problem once and for all, though. Their bendy e-Dura implant combines flexible electrodes (made of platinum and silicon microbeads), cracked gold electronic tracks and fluidic microchannels to deliver both electrical impulses and chemicals while mimicking the spine's movements and avoiding friction. Paralyzed rats in lab tests could both walk again after a few weeks and keep wearing their implants after two months.
LG's new 4K OLED TVs can do flat, curved -- or both
Quantum dot 4K LCD screens are nice, but it's LG's OLED TVs that we're most interested in, and the second generation is ready to ship this year. The best news? If last year's curved displays bothered you, these are all available in flat "Floating Art Slim" designs as well as curved. The top-of-the-line 77-inch 77EG9900 (pictured above) is flexible enough to do both, bringing last year's funky concept design to reality. The other six models are just flat or curved, and come in 55-, 65- and 77-inch sizes, with the new webOS 2.0 built-in. The bad news? There's still no word on price -- last year's 65-inch 4K OLED started out with a $10,000 MSRP -- but we're liveblogging today's press conference so we'll let you know if we hear any more details.
Sticky sensors will monitor your body's organs
Health sensors that attach directly to your organs to are potentially very useful, since they can measure miniscule electrical signals and other details that might otherwise fly under the radar. There's just one problem: actually sticking those devices on to something that soft and squishy is tough. However, a team of Japanese researchers may have a solution. They've developed gel-based sensors that monitor electrical activity and strain while adhering to just about anything, including the gooey wet insides of your body. The key is the gel itself, which is made of the polyvinyl alcohol you might find in protective gloves or eye drops; it allows a grid of sensors to make contact without peeling or slipping off.
60 seconds with a giant, rollable display for your mobile devices
At some point, you've probably wished that your smartphone had a much larger screen to watch a movie or get work done... but you can't always lug a desktop display or tablet around, can you? If Insert Coin finalist RollRR has its way, you won't have to. It's developing rollable displays that would give your mobile devices a lot more visual real estate without consuming much space in your bag. The prototype on the Engadget Expand show floor is a 10.7-inch roll of e-paper attached to a giant tube, but the ultimate goal is to fit a 21-inch or larger screen (ideally, full color plastic OLED) into a gadget the size of a small umbrella. It's also considering touch technology like 3M's silver nanowires, so RollRR could expand your input area, too -- you could edit a large image on your phone just by unrolling the sheet on a table.
BeBop's smart fabric puts sensors in everything you wear
Wearable sensors don't tend to do much; they're usually limited to health data like EKG readings or your heart rate. If BeBop Sensors has its way, though, they'll be useful for just about anything that comes in contact with your body. Its new smart fabric sensor tracks virtually every aspect of physical presence, including bending, location, movement and pressure. As you might imagine, that opens the door to... well, quite a lot. You could have smart insoles that track both your pace and your running style, or baseball gloves that help perfect your swing; BeBop also sees uses in everything from wearable controllers to smart yoga mats that improve your poses. The company is only providing the basic technology, not finished products, so it'll be a while before you see this smart cloth in something you can buy. Even so, it's clear that there's a lot of potential -- you may always have a way to measure your activities without resorting to wristbands or other conspicuous gear.
MIT's new material opens the door to squishable, shape-shifting robots
Robots tend to be either very rigid or very soft, but neither extreme is ideal; ideally, machines could both squish themselves into tight spaces and remain sturdy for strength-dependent tasks. They just might, thanks to a team-up between MIT and Google's Boston Dynamics. The two have developed a composite material that can switch between hard and soft states on the fly. The design mates a compressible foam inside with an external wax coating. If a robot needed to deform, all it would have to do is soften the right joints with a bit of heating. It could even heal damage by heating and cooling an affected area.
Nanowires three atoms wide could lead to paper-thin gadgets
What's that odd shape, you ask? That's the world's thinnest nanowire -- and it could be the key to a future wave of flexible devices. In blasting single-layered, semiconducting materials with an electron beam, Vanderbilt University student Junhao Lin has created wires that measure just three atoms wide while remaining strong and very bendy. Since there are already transistors and memory gates made out of the same material, Lin envisions circuits and whole devices that are paper-thin, yet can stand up to abuse; in the long run, he envisions rollable tablets and TVs that could fit in your pocket. The technique could help produce 3D circuitry, too. We're still a long way from either of those becoming practical realities, but the discovery at least shows that they're technically possible.
Raid design evolution and Warlords of Draenor
Blizzard has posted parts one and two of a series of Dev Watercoolers, discussing raid design over the course of World of Warcraft. Now part three is live, highlighting and explaining where raiding is going in Warlords of Draenor. The post covers new systems like the Group Finder (basically integrating the OQueue style functionality), buffs to LFR, explains the new Mythic difficulty and flexible group system for normal/heroic, and discusses how raid lockouts will work in Warlords, with each raiding difficulty (Raid Finder, Normal, Heroic and Mythic) having its own lockout, and how valor points will be scaled back to prevent players feeling like they have to clear each raid difficulty each week. If you raid, you should probably check it out. The full text is reproduced behind the break.
Japanese smart diaper is destined to have a lot of crappy days
The current move towards wearables is surely good news for us, but unremittingly bad news for them. A flexible sensor developed at the University of Tokyo is about to discover just how bad when it's put to work as a sort of early warning system inside diapers. It's constructed from a printable organic circuit that detects changes in wetness, temperature and pressure, but apparently not smell (small mercies). It can charge wirelessly and transmit data wirelessly too, so that a caregiver holding a receiver can tell whether a baby or incontinent elderly person needs changing without having to unclothe them first. The device is expected to come to market as soon as its power efficiency has been improved, and we bet it can't wait.
Watch a fake flower blossom thanks to flexible 3D-printed materials (video)
Richard Clarkson, a student at New York's School of Visual Arts, has used a combination of pneumatics and 3D-printed flexible-materials to create an artificial flower that "blooms," and the result is pretty neat. When air fills a cavity in the rubbery petals, they expand and push outward against the harder center bulb, replicating how a real flower blossoms. Clarkson said he chose a flower for this experiment because he wanted to model something organic from an entirely non-organic process. Words really don't do the art project justice however, which is why we've embedded a video of the installation after the break -- check it out.
Stratasys' new 3D printer creates multicolored flexible materials
Stratasys' has a new $330,000 3D printer, but this one has the potential to do a whole lot more than monochrome figurines. In fact, the company says it's the first machine able to create objects in colored, flexible materials. The Objet500 Connex3 3D printer uses rubber and plastic as base materials, although according to Stratasys (the company which now owns the MakerBot series) material combinations will be able to offer different levels of rigidity, transparency and opacity. Colors, meanwhile, are produced by the same mix of cyan, magenta and yellow you'll find on your inkjet printer at home -- it even comes with six palettes of rubbery "tango" colors, if you're perhaps looking to channel your '90s tastes into some tasteful flexible booties, as seen above. At the technical level, the printer can go as fine as 16-micron layers, offering a high level of detail and finish, and can pump out around 30kg of resin (that is, base material) per run. Talking to the BBC, a Stratasys spokesperson said the advanced printer could cut down industrial design prototyping times by 50 percent, although he was talking about the time from prototype to market, not printing time itself. The Objet500 Connex3 launches today, although those flexible color printing materials won't be available to buy until Q2 later this year, so hold on to those neo-boot dreams for now.
LG G Flex for AT&T, T-Mobile shows up in pictures
Just in case you haven't seen enough of LG's limber 6-inch G Flex smartphone, the bowed wonder has appeared in press shots posted by @evleaks. The pictures aren't shocking for a phone we've already had our hands all over and even reviewed as an international model, but after passing through the FCC's database, we suppose this just another step on the way to release. There's no word on a release date or US pricing (the Sprint edition that's surfaced is also missing, but the renders above do show different dates on the phones -- March 17th for AT&T and February 12th for T-Mobile), but we're sure those details will be revealed in due time.
Motorola shows how it could make smartwatches with flexible displays
Motorola has already filed for patents on both wrist-worn gadgets and flexible displays. Today, we're seeing what happens when the company merges the two technologies. A newly published patent application has revealed a Motorola concept for a smartwatch-like device where both the screen and the shell underneath can flex in tandem. Much like a metal watch band, the chassis would be made of links; grips on each link would bend the display. It's a simple idea, although we're not expecting a product out of it any time soon -- the company will need flexible circuits before any bendy wearables can reach its roadmap.
Flex difficulty smoothing coming soon
Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas has posted today on Flexible raids, and the scaling thereof. As ever, you can read Ion's whole post after the break, but the key points relate to what was discussed at BlizzCon regarding raid scaling. Essentially, the new system will, in most cases, introduce a chance at getting an extra instance of whatever ability. Ion explains this in full after the break, so I'll spare you the repetition, but the exciting news is that, to combat the current issues, it's coming in sooner than the expansion. There are some misconceptions floating around, particularly in PuG Flex groups, that there are certain break points which make a raid drastically harder. While it is the case that, as Ion notes, certain abilities scale up with hard breaks at certain numbers, the scaling of Flex favors larger groups. The new scaling will do so even more, essentially removing hard breakpoints for raid size. Hit the break for Ion's full post.
