BBC News School Report @ LCS

Scientists have recently invented a bendy touchscreen, which proves that phones and tablets could be rolled up into your pockets. Engineers at the University of British Columbia have designed a flexible gel material, which will be inserted with sensors. These sensors will pick up touch…even when squished out of its original form!

Previous attempts to devise flexible smartphones have failed as the material had struggled to identify the difference between touch and stretch, however, the new material continued to work when completely folded in half. It even survived a coffee spill!

Although this is an exciting new breakthrough, it will be a while before we have access to them as consumers. The prototypes of these smartphones and iPads are being still being tested to allow for more advanced adaptions.

This exciting new material can also be laid on roads and pavements to detect accidents or to wrap around steering wheels.

Doctoral student Mizral Saquib Sarwar quoted for the Telegraph: ‘The technology we are working with right now is a very flexible, touch sensor that enables you to have stretchable, flexible, bendable and even rollable smartphones and ipads.

Imagine having a big tablet, and once you’re done with it you can just fold it up and put it in your pocket! This will open up a whole new horizon of possibilities in human computer interactions.

Professor John Madden added: ‘This is part of larger effort to create wearable devices and to create robotic skins.’

Tests showed the touchpad could also detect multiple fingers simultaneously which is necessary for a typical zoom in on a smartphone. One of the attractive features is that it uses two materials that are very low in cost.

This transparent material costs just 80p per square metre, so it would be extremely low cost and easy to scale up.

We produced a survey to see if people thought that this was a good idea and if this would benefit them. 7/10 people said that they would prefer to have a phone that rolls up and can go into their pocket. 90% of people said that this would benefit them, in the sense that it would be easier for them to carry around, especially if they have small purses/pockets