This kind of flies in the face of Ray Kurzweil’s prediction that well before that time “computers will disappear as distinct physical objects.” A computer screen, even a flat , flexible one, is still a distinct physical object.

I agree with Kurzweil. With augmented reality and virtual reality, why will we need flexible computer screens? Even rolled up, they are not that easy to carry.

The technology is impressive, but perhaps it can be put to other uses. About the most interesting use I’ve heard is a t-shirt that changes messages, perhaps “I’m with stupid” with an arrow that points in either direction, depending on who you’re walking with.

Just a thought, but I sort of love the idea that you could pop this thing into a photocopier and make a copy of whatever’s on the screen.

maybe an email is more functional ultimately. But the photocopier thing is intriguing.

And we need to be able to plug a thumbdrive into it… plugs into the top of the stylus? Maybe the stylus also has a battery in it and transfers power to the paper when they touch? Or vice-versa if the paper is on a charging surface (desk, piano, music stand…)

It would be super cool to have a thumb-drive full of sheet music you could just plug into the display. Set it on the music stand (which is connected to speakers?) and then your sheet music could have a play button on it… not sure how that part sounds…? highlight it, hit the play button….

I am leery of the deformation gesture concept… traditional pen and multi-touch gestures are coming along nicely on tablets etc.. deformation gestures would seem to introduce the possibility of stuff happening while you’re putting the things away, storing them, etc. Bah! I’m sure I’m worrying about nothing. They’ll debug the deformational stuff.

Anyway, its an intriguing concept. especially in a collaborative context. Not so much maybe as a standalone device (tablets are becoming prety good standalone devices), but music for a piano or music stand, checksheets that interact with machinery they are designed for, feedback forms posted at events… cheap advertising (if they get super cheap)…

lots of possibilities.

@Editor: don’t get frustrated with people complaining about lack of polish. Seeing stuff at this stage of development (and even earlier) is why I subscribe to this newsletter…

where you can put iPads together, draw a 2D racetrack (1980s style -”Super Sprint”), and racer over head, across the iPads.

“Pad Racer” was a fad, it was released when the iPad 1 was first released.

Many similar “connect two iPad” games followed, to capitalise on the idea.

(Note that the Scrabble app on iPad – actually, in fact by far the #1 best selling iPad app of all time – does a similar thing. it’s not exactly a novel idea.)

I LOVE these paper-thin displays; the idea of making “pads that link together” is just cheesy and silly.

I mean what was before the highest form of intellectual practice i.e. abstract and hypothetico-deductive reasoning requiring imagination on “intuited objects” has now regressed in yet another form of concrete operations (the stade preceding formal operations in the Piagetian scale of intelligence evolution) exercising like e.g. “click here”, “drag there” and so on (on hateful modal interfaces) as been exemplified by the computerized (and aging) “desktop” metaphor.

With the demonstrated work, we are yet a further step down this path, not even inhabiting an (abstracted) world of concrete operations but more and more a sensori-motor one (hence further regression). Quite literally, here we are required to have tablet B be touched by tablet A to have a typical workflow been continued. Oh, very well, now you’ll need to buy at least 2 tablets to compose and send an email, a sure way to promote further growth of a market segment about to stall in a world where everybody soon enough will have his/her tablet. Even better, we’ll be required to have n tablets for a workflow in n steps, this is sheer economical genius, what a wonderful world!

Instead of this stupidity (notice how awkward the keyboard is, so much that in the demo the answered email consists of 4 letters only, i.e. “done”), I would like to see design teams and developers actually THINK of a better way to use the sheer ever increasing power of a tablet’s (or eReader’s) CPU and memory by organizing the documents in a way to have them, all the relevant ones, easily accessible and better organized.

Consider for example, that the Kindle still has no proper folders or way to index your ebook library by theming (metadata) or to sort them along various usual filters like e.g. author’s name, publisher’s name, publishing date, Dewey decimal classification index etc.

What a moronic world!