Innovating beyond the cell phone screen

One-way companies like Samsung and Apple are trying to differentiate themselves is by reducing the bezel on your cell phone, which has been the growing trend of 2017. But what gives? Innovations with OLED (Organic Light Emitting Displays) are now produced without any display borders, defining characteristics or future display technology with at least 75% of market embracing the design trend. While this may be impressive to see and hold in your hand, what could others do stand out? With Amazon rapidly extending their technology in many parts of our lives, how could they change the cell phone market to bring more customers to them and provide an experience never seen before? Holographic wearables might be the answer.

RED, a company famous for producing the best Hollywood film cameras will enter the cell phone market with a first of a kind holographic display. While we have yet to see how successful this attempt will be, it will surely start competitive growth in a new trend we have not yet seen if the technology lives up to standard. Sure, holograms have been seen since Star War’s Princess Leia’s hologram, but they have never made it to our hands until RED drops their phone in our hands. Holographic tech is insanely cool and can have limitless applications and use cases from live calling, to shopping, to navigation all possible with a device now on your wrist instead of your hand.

If you want to see an example, look no further than a video game called Star Citizen, where a team of talented designers created a wrist worn holographic bracelet called MobiGlas which looks stunning. There is no physical display, just projection lenses shooting the image up to the user as soon as he or she activates it. Of course, the image is also fully interactive, allowing the user to navigate around the UI as they normally would with a cell phone.

Currently, wearables are mainly about health and fitness tracking, however this advancement in technology will change when we can have the same experience not limited to a small screen found on the wearable today.

If you are interested in knowing how users would interact with the user interface, Leap Motion has figured out a way that uses sound waves to give you haptic feedback to your finger depending on what you are clicking in thin air. We already have haptic feedback in our phones so why not in thin air. Expect manufacturers to compete with these innovations in the near future. 

Being the first in the industry to cram such technology into one small compact package can certainly cause a shift in how we interact with our devices. Imagine now we have another alternative to do what we all love to but only without having to physically hold something in our hands. Wearable technologies will soon outgrow their current use case of fitness tracking and eventually take over and get to a point where we may find that physically holding a screen will seem like a chore and an eye sore. 

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