Imagine a smartphone screen that bends into different shapes and plays sound—all without any extra speakers or bulky parts.
A research team from POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology) in South Korea has made that a reality with the world’s first OLED panel that can both change its shape and work as a speaker, while staying super thin and flexible.
Led by Professor Su Seok Choi and his team, the new technology was published in the journal npj Flexible Electronics.
It could change how we design smartphones, wearables, and even future tech like soft robots.
Today’s flexible screens can bend and fold, but they still rely on extra hardware like hinges or motors.
These parts make devices thicker, heavier, and more limited in how they can change shape. Plus, current devices need separate speaker parts, which add even more bulk.
The POSTECH team came up with a smarter way. They used a very thin, special material called a piezoelectric polymer actuator.
When electricity is applied, this material can move and change shape without any gears, hinges, or motors. The screen can curve into many forms—concave, convex, S-shaped, or wave-like—all by using electric signals. It’s like the display is alive and in motion.
And that’s not all. The same material can also create tiny vibrations to produce sound. That means the screen itself becomes a speaker! No more needing separate audio parts—the OLED panel shows images and plays sound.
“This is the first time a display can both change its shape freely and make sound, all in one thin, flexible panel,” said Professor Choi. “We kept all the benefits of OLED—lightweight, thin, and soft—and gave it new abilities.”
To prove it works, the team built a smartphone-sized OLED panel. It successfully changed shape again and again while playing clear audio—all while staying slim and bendable.
This is a big step ahead of current bendable screens from major tech companies. For example, some new OLED monitors from LG and Samsung still use motors or extra structures to bend and include separate speakers. But POSTECH’s version doesn’t need any of that. Everything is built into the screen itself.
This exciting technology could lead to all kinds of new gadgets—phones with moving screens, smart wearables with built-in sound, flexible car dashboards, and even robots with expressive, talking displays.
It’s a big leap toward smarter, more interactive devices of the future.
Source: KSR.
