"It's extremely exciting. It's really pushing the envelope forward," said Audrey Girouard, a post doctoral fellow at the Human Media Lab and one of the people who worked on the flexible computer project.

"Introducing bend into a computer is new. Nobody has done that. There's nothing that relates in current products," she said.

How cutting edge the project is was illustrated by people in a test group who were asked to try the bendable computer.

"They were reluctant to bend the display.

"You don't want to do something that might break it, and if you were to bend your iPhone, it would break," she said.

"It's not something you would naturally do with electronics."

The flexible computer is to be unveiled at next week's Association of Computing Machinery's Computer Human Interaction conference in Vancouver.

Wednesday's announcement of the breakthrough has already created a buzz on the Internet and in tech circles.

A video uploaded to YouTube demonstrating how the paper computer works has had more than 100,000 views since it was posted Tuesday.

http://www.thewhig.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3111213