Polyera, a flexible electronics company has created the Wove Band, a wearable device with a flexible display. The Wove band is made possible thanks to Polyera’s Digital Fabric Technology™. The device is set to be the world’s first product that will feature a flexible display when it is released in 2016.
Wove was revealed in August of 2015 and marked the culmination of over ten years of research in the physics of flexible electronics. The result was a platform called Polyera Digital Fabric Technology, an innovative blend of great product design and science and electrical engineering.
Wove Band: The World’s First Flexible Electronic Device
The platform has allowed Polyera to create the world’s first flexible display device in the Wove Band which will ship as a flexible device that can be worn around the wrist.
The Wove Band has a multi-touch display that has a surface area about five times that of a smartwatch. The device will function just as a smartwatch would with apps and graphics available at the tap of your wrist.
Wove will feature the revolutionary flexible display by harnessing the unique technology of physically flexible electronics. The band can be bent and flexed during use repeatedly without any damage occurring to the display or the rest of the wearable device.
That Polyera has managed to overcome the obstacles in developing flexible electronic devices is in itself amazing. The company sees the Wove Band as proof of the ability to produce electronic wearables at scale and envisions a future where such devices will become smarter and become a bigger part of our daily lives.
With the average area of real estate on a smartwatch face averaging at around 700 mm square, that the Wove Band will initially boast over a screen area of over 4000 square mm also bodes well. Imagine what you could do with all that space!
While Polyera has developed the tools, designs, and intellectual property that allows the company to achieve a flexible device without sacrificing integrity, the flexible electronics pioneers will also need to work hard on ensuring a pleasant user experience when the device ships next year. That surely makes the Wove Band one of the devices to watch out for in 2016.
Polyera was founded in August of 2015 and the company had begun experimenting and demonstrating flexible TFT’s by March of the next year. The company’s Co-Founder, Tobin J. Marks, was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2007 which led the company to raising over four million dollars through private backers. The company continued to grow over the next decade with further demonstrations and breakthroughs in flexible TFT technologies, including the first demonstrations of flexible display prototypes.
With over 100 patents filed, Polyera now also has offices in Taiwan, Illinois, as well as San Francisco, and has significantly upscaled the supply chain for flexible-display device mass production.
The Wove Band will be the beginning in flexible smart wearables or devices and the basis for future technology that can be manipulated to suit particular tasks, as well as the scope of its potential uses.
