Philips Polymer Vision: A Realization of Phineas J. Whoopee’s 3D Blackboard

Philips Polymer Vision recently announced a new rollable display for use with mobile devices and applications:

The Polymer Vision PV-QML5 is an ultra-thin (100µm) featherweight QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) active-matrix display with a diagonal of 5 inches. When not actively used, the display can be rolled up into a small housing with a radius of curvature of less than 7.5 mm. With four gray levels, the monochrome display provides paperlike viewing comfort with a high (10:1) contrast ratio for reading-intensive applications. Even in bright daylight, the display is easy to read. Using a bi-stable electrophoretic display effect from E Ink Corp., the display consumes an exceptionally low amount of power. It is thus ideally suited for mobile applications.

There are, of course, many useful applications for a scrollable display, some of which are highlighted on the Polymer Vision home page, and in their products and applications pages.  In looking them over, I was reminded of the 3-dimensional blackboard used by Phineas J. Whoopee, in the Tennessee Tuxedo cartoon series I watched as a child.  Whenever they had a problem to solve, Mr. Whoopee would pull a small slate out of his closet, and expand it to a full-sized blackboard, which would then provide a surface through which they could work on the solution (and upon which instructional filmclips could be shown). 

I don’t know if the researchers working on this project were in any way influenced by Tennessee Tuxedo.  Science fiction has long been a resource for technology research and development (a fact that is noted on the Polymer Vision home page) … it’s interesting to consider how cartoons may also be a source of inspiration.