Google Patent Releases Screen You Can Rip Off

Digital screens can already be bent and rolled . But Google seems to want to make them tearable too.
In a patent filing published Thursday, inventors detailed a new kind of device that people can rip and then put back together. When the screen is modified, the contents are modified as well.
Google uses a lost dog flier to illustrate how it could work. The flier shows a photo of a dog when it's wholly intact. When torn, the smaller display presents the picture of the dog and a phone number.
The patent filing was first spotted by Mikhail Avady, the founder of legal software company
ClientSide .

Avady says the patent is important because it points to two concepts long promised by sci-fi films: modular displays and disposable displays.

Samsung, one of the biggest manufacturers of digital screens, showed off a way that modular displays can work during CES this year. By pushing together multiple small screens, Samsung made a screen that was even bigger.

Disposable displays probably won't emerge as a viable technology until manufacturing costs drop significantly. But engineers have also been working on ways to make digital pixels appear on regular paper too.
"We hold patents on a variety of ideas -- some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don't," a Google statement said.
"Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patents."