Oppo wasn’t afraid to explain the magic here. The phone is essentially a motorized scroll, with a large part of the OLED panel laminated on top of a “Warp Track” for improved strength, as it goes around a “Roll Motor” (with a 6.8mm scroll diameter) on the left to tuck itself inside the hidden compartment. The phone itself consists of a “2-in-1 Plate” body construction: these two parts roll out simultaneously and evenly for better structural support.
Oppo applied for 122 patents for this project, 12 of which were on the scroll mechanism alone. THe company stopped short at providing further details — no word on the screen specs, the panel’s supplier nor durability figures. Levin Liu, OPPO Vice President and Head of OPPO Research Institute, stressed that the Oppo X 2021 was still in concept stage, but he hopes to bring this technology to consumers “at the right time.”
The idea of a rollable display is nothing new. LG’s very own rollable OLED TV entered the consumer market about a month ago, but you’ll have to fork out $87,000 for one. Potential cost issues aside, rehousing this technology into a smartphone is more complicated in many ways, especially when it comes to structural strength and durability. If the phone makers can overcome those problems, it would sure be nice to have rollable phones as an alternative to chunkier foldable phones.
At the same event, the company announced the Oppo AR Glass 2021, a follow-up to its original model from last December. Thanks to its “split design” which relies on a connection to a smartphone, these new concept glasses are around 75 percent lighter than their predecessors, but they still pack a bunch of sensors for both real-time SLAM local mapping and gesture tracking: stereo fisheye cameras, a Time-of-Flight sensor and an RGB camera. The “Birdbath” optical solution — a common and inexpensive implementation on AR glasses — is said to mimic the experience of a 90-inch TV screen, but Oppo didn’t provide further specs, though it plans to launch an AR developer co-creation program next year to leverage this piece of kit.
The idea of a rollable display is nothing new. LG’s very own rollable OLED TV entered the consumer market about a month ago, but you’ll have to fork out $87,000 for one.
