You’d think that there’d be a certain minimum size that cellphones and PDAs could possibly shrink down to, such as too small to have buttons that can be pressed by normal-sized human fingers. But you’d be wrong. Sony’s Interaction Lab is working on a prototype for a credit card-sized gadget called the “Gummi” that ditches buttons entirely, and instead is controlled by being bent and twisted into different shapes:
In the Gummi, the team has combined a standard, rigid LCD with sensors and a touch pad all mounted in a flexible acrylic plastic block. Users can manipulate information on the screen by flexing the board and using the touch-sensitive pad to control the content. Piezoelectric pressure sensors, which generate a voltage when deformed, are built into the Gummi to detect the flexing…The resulting device would have no conventional mechanical parts. You would steer the cursor using a touch panel on the reverse of the mini PC, while pushing the middle of the device in or out would let you browse through a menu. Bending could also control tasks such as zooming in and out of a map, controlling the playback speed of video files and editing the composition of image layers.
