Totem Rollable OLED display offers enhanced viewing and doubles as a soundbar

Totem Rollable Display with Soundbar

Display technology has come a long way, and we believe it will continue to improve. Gadget screens have advanced, and now flexible and rollable displays are available.

The rollable display technology is relatively new, but it is now used on smartphones. Soon, we’ll see foldable tablets and rollable TVs or touchscreen windows or walls in the future. The possibilities are endless with rollable OLED displays, especially tech giants like LG are at the forefront.

Designers: Richard Bone and Jisu Yun (Studio BooBoon)

Totem Flexible Display with Soundbar

The LG Display team has launched a competition that aimed to imagine and design products and experiences that would present the use of LG digital displays. The designs should be able to enhance users’ lives and offer new experiences.

The competition now has 20 shortlisted designs. Some of the designs include cabinet doors with digital displays or foldable televisions that transform into lamps. One notable project was the Totem by Studio BooBoon, led by designers Richard Bone and Jisu Yun. The Tokyo-based team came up with the Totem, a rollable display and soundbar in one.

Totem Rollable Display Demo

The name Totem is used because of the upright position. It can also be used horizontally or as a soundbar only. It was presented in different colors: Charcoal, White, Blue Grey, and Salmon. The device is also said to offer a minimal footprint.

Totem Rollable Display with Soundbar

The flexible OLED technology is being used here. It allows a customizable display that can be adjusted to different heights. This reminds us of a portable and retractable projector screen.

The LG Display’s rollable OLED technology is used and then integrated with a soundbar. Studio Booboon’s Totem can be used as a soundbar only. It may also be used for digital graphics with music. We can imagine this being used in different establishments for promotion, education, or information.

Totem Rollable Display Soundbar

The Totem can also be used at home as you can use it in different ways. It can be an intelligent display for screen mirroring or a freestanding speaker. It offers enhanced viewing of videos or movies when you want a more prominent display. The designers shared they “wanted to create something characterful and sculptural that blends into the user’s home seamlessly.” The result is the Totem which is very versatile.

Totem Rollable Display Details

The screen-soundbar concept appears like an art piece by itself. It’s minimalist, and its aesthetics can fit most interiors. It’s part of the shortlist for a competition where only five will be recognized as top designers. The overall winner will get €35,000 in June. The second placer will get €20,000; the third place will receive €15,000, while the fourth placer will get €10,000, and the last one will get €8,000.

Totem Flexible Display

The post Totem Rollable OLED display offers enhanced viewing and doubles as a soundbar first appeared on Yanko Design.

Futuristic laptop concept comes with a detachable smartphone instead of a trackpad





The AIO Phone-book does a bunch of incredibly radical things, let’s count them down. Firstly, it comes with a built-in smartphone that detaches when you need, and docks back to turn into a trackpad. Secondly, to account for the size discrepancy between smartphones and conventional trackpads, the phone sports a rolling display that allows it to not just expand, but bend too, turning into a mouse. If that wasn’t enough, the empty docking region on the laptop even acts as a wireless charging zone, for items like your AirPods. It’s possible that the AIO Phone-book, even as a concept, bites off more than it can chew… but hey, being creative and innovative ain’t a crime, right?

Designer: Kylin Wu

AIO Phone-Book with Detachable Smartphone Trackpad

A winner of the Spark Design Award (probably for sheer far-fetched futurism), the AIO Phone-book comes from the mind of Kylin Wu, a Shenzhen-based Industrial Designer. Objectively, without looking back at what laptops have been like for the past decade, the AIO Phone-book makes a pretty common observation. The trackpad has a touch-sensitive surface, and so does the phone… so why don’t they both exist together as a single device? The AIO Phone-book comes with a smartphone that sits flush against its keyboard, with a screen that serves as a trackpad + mini-tablet. When docked in place, the smartphone acts as an auxiliary device for the laptop, allowing you to use its screen as a numpad, control center, and a trackpad. Detach it, and you’ve got yourself a smartphone that can be used independently as its own device, or as a mouse for your laptop.

AIO Phone-Book with Detachable Smartphone Trackpad

AIO Phone-Book with Detachable Smartphone Trackpad

The smartphone comes with an expanding design, made possible thanks to a rolling screen and a unique flexible hinge that allows the phone to expand as well as curve. We’re WAY DEEP in uncharted territory so let’s not try to bring logic or hardware limitations into this. While the smartphone’s undocked, the empty space on the laptop serves as a platform for wirelessly charging other devices like your TWS earbuds. When you’re done and you want to dock your phone back in again, it snaps in place and contact points on the top and the bottom of the phone connect it to the laptop, allowing it to charge (as well as potentially send and receive files).

AIO Phone-Book with Detachable Smartphone Trackpad

The idea of docking a smartphone inside a laptop isn’t new. Razer even showcased a prototype of this very concept with their Project Linda back in 2018. There’s no official word on why Razer never really took this concept forward, but a few thoughts come to mind – the most notable one being that people buy phones and laptops separately, and they change their smartphones MUCH more often than they change their laptops. Besides, it would create logistical and usability issues too. What do you do when you’re on a call and you need a mouse or trackpad? Or worse, what if you lose your phone? It’s safe to say the AIO Phone-book is one of those ‘absolutely unreal’ concepts because beyond being able to dock your phone in your laptop, the AIO comes with a flexible, rollable phone too. That’s WAY too many moving parts and fragile components. However, the idea of being able to use your smartphone in conjunction with your laptop is a pretty promising one. You could wirelessly charge your phone off the laptop (something Apple’s reportedly been working on), use it as a remote control for your laptop, an extended screen, a num-pad, or as Apple’s also demonstrated with Universal Control, use it to seamlessly drag and drop files between devices. That being said, the AIO Phone-book’s definitely one of the more zany concepts out there, although it does prompt us to push technology further and further…

AIO Phone-Book with Detachable Smartphone Trackpad

The Samsung Galaxy Stick smartphone has a rolling display like LG’s TV!

Now while this isn’t an official Samsung concept, I can’t help but really wish it was one! Combining technologies that aren’t outside the realm of possibility, the Samsung Galaxy Stick makes perhaps the best use of a flexible display. It rolls it up into a smart, dynamic scroll, making the Samsung Galaxy Stick perhaps the most interesting smartphone concept of 2019.

The scroll-esque screen is a hat-tip to Samsung’s advancements in flexible OLED displays, and when not in use, it rolls right up into the phone’s slim, hollow, wand-like body. When you need the display, it promptly comes rolling out, turning the wand into a usable smartphone, with a nifty flexible touchscreen that maintains rigidity when unfolded. The Galaxy Stick even packs a secondary slimmer display on its body, to be used for more functional elements like calls, messages, battery indicators, etc. The secondary touchscreen is permanent, showcasing notifications when the flexible screen is rolled in, and even houses an in-screen fingerprint sensor for unlocking your smartphone.

The only caveat of this piece of sheer innovative design is the fact that the Galaxy Stick packs only one primary camera on its back… a drawback that shouldn’t really be a problem, considering the Galaxy Stick sets out to solve more pressing problems, like creating a flexible-display smartphone that doesn’t crease, and that isn’t a massive brick. The rolling display format could make a pretty unique proof-of-concept. Obviously, this makes the phone incredibly vulnerable, given that the screen needs to be mounted on a delicate mechanism that helps it roll and unroll (not to mention the fact that three out of four sides of the Galaxy Stick, when opened, are an exposed OLED display with no protection). The second-most pressing problem is obviously that a smaller, more compact phone invariably means a smaller battery too, which in the case of the Galaxy Stick, isn’t enough. While phones are getting more and more powerful, batteries aren’t getting better, they’re just getting bigger… Until someone invents a more efficient and compact battery, the Galaxy Stick may remain just a concept, but don’t lose hope! Today’s concept is tomorrow’s proof-of-concept!

Designer: Pranab P Kumar