Polyera has announced the Wove Band, a flexible display that can be used flat on a table or can be wrapped around a user's wrist, similar to the slap bracelet from the 1980s.

The device has been under development for a long 10 years and is expected to be released to the public in mid-2016.

"Most attempts at making flexible displays have relied on traditional electronics materials, such as silicon, being deposited on plastic substrates," said Polyera in a statement. "This approach allows the creation of products with fixed curved screens, but the brittleness of these electronics layers makes them unsuitable for products which are dynamically flexible such as the Wove Band."

The display on the Wove band is a little different than other devices. The band uses the company's Digital Fabric Technology combined with an electronic ink film, allowing for the display to be always on.

While the band won't be available to the public until mid-2016, developers can get their hands on a device as early as next month by signing up online for an email notification once Polyera opens up for submissions for the Wove 0.1 prototype.

Flexible displays are becoming increasingly popular as companies begin to incorporate them into their products. An example of this is the Samsung Galaxy Edge series. The difference is, however, that here, users can actually bend the display themselves, while with the Samsung device the display is bent, but locked in place. At CES 2013, Samsung announced the Youm flexible display, which allows users to bend the display back and forth. In July 2014, LG announced a similar display that can be rolled up to a radius of three centimeters, or around one inch, without affecting the display's functionality.

Polyera explains that the real challenge wasn't creating a display that was flexible, but rather creating a device that could be bent despite the companion electronics inside. While companies such as Polyera have been able to create working prototypes of things like tablets, the challenges of creating a device that can withstand day-to-day use have been the real issue.

While Wove has an e-ink display, which makes it black and white, Polyera says that the point is the technology behind it, which could be applied to OLED panels, creating full color displays that can play back video and so on.

Via: PCMag