Bringing ancient scrolls into the touchscreen age

In what has become known as his seminal Sprawl Trilogy, Canadian-American science fiction author William Gibson envisaged a display screen that could unroll from a tiny computer. Written in the early 1980s, it appeared hopelessly futuristic: Gibson didn’t even imagine that it would be responsive to touch, as we take for granted with display screens today. Researchers from the human media lab (HML) at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario have now turned Gibson’s idea into reality with the MagicScroll – a flexible touchscreen display that can roll up and unroll.

Like Gibson’s idea, the Queen’s team has taken inspiration from one of the earliest forms of written communication: the ancient scroll. Originating in ancient Egypt, scrolls are a highly efficient way of displaying information. They can be unrolled completely to show their full content, or scanned by unrolling one spindle while simultaneously rerolling the other, keeping their form compact. This was the way that they were used in ancient China and Japan to display artwork in a long strip that was meant to be unrolled slowly. Such action at one end could be seen to continue to the other (known as handscrolls, these were arguably the forerunners of today’s comic strips and even animated films). With the advent of flexible screens based on organic LED (OLED) technology, the HML team, led by Roel Vertegaal, who pioneered research into flexible displays in the early 2000s, decided to try to revive this form of information perusal.