Toshiba LCD panel zooms by bending it

You won’t need to bend it like Beckham with this new LCD panel by Toshiba, since it will offer a totally different method of zooming in and out of an image – instead of using the popular pinch trick that the iPhone made popular, all you need to do is bend this panel and the image will contract or zoom in accordingly. This is made possible thanks to a bend sensor whose resistance value changes by bending it, where the sensor itself is located at the end of the backlight unit. In order to come up with this LCD panel, Toshiba manufactured a thin backlight unit that can be bent to a curvature radius of 50mm, boasting an edge-lighting LED backlight unit whose light guide plate is as thin as 0.4mm. Needless to say, appropriate software also had to be written to let images zoom in and out accordingly. Currently, the LCD panel measures 8.4″ in size and has a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. Don’t think we’ll be getting Gumby-style phones anytime soon, so a practical application for such an LCD panel will have to be done elsewhere. Check out a video of it in action right after the jump.