Although we doubt you’ll be seeing it at your local Best Buy anytime soon, the PaperFold is one experimental smartphone design that really catches the eye. Developed by researchers at Queen’s College in Canada, the PaperFold uses three different displays that can fold over one another and are responsive to where they are relative to each other. So for instance, if you fold out the device to look like a laptop with one display flat on the table and another set up vertically, the device will know to make the horizontal display into a keyboard and the vertical display into your primary screen.
“In PaperFold, each display tile can act independently or as part of a single system,” explains Dr. Vertegaal, a Queen’s University professor at its School of Computing. “It allows multiple device form factors, providing support for mobile tasks that require large screen real estate or keyboards on demand, while retaining an ultra-compact, ultra-thin and lightweight form factor.”
The Queen’s University researchers showed off the new phone this week at the ACM CHI 2014 conference in Toronto. You can watch a video of the phone in action below.
