While most news from the Consumer Electronics Show is about new products, some early stage technology that could appear in future generations of products also gets unveiled. This year several companies demonstrated prototype technology that could make future touch screens flexible, curved, or even capable of sprouting physical buttons for certain tasks.

One of the most striking ideas on show was PaperTab, an early prototype of a tablet computer flexible enough to roll up like a newspaper. PaperTab was created by the Human Media Lab at Queen’s University, Canada, with the assistance of Plastic Logic, a U.K. company that makes flexible display technology. In Las Vegas, Aneesh Tarun and Roel Vertegaal from Queen’s showed off the prototypes, which still require tethering to a power source.

The Waterloo duo combined an off-the-shelf touch-sensing sheet with a black and white display from Plastic Logic that was 0.3 millimeters thick to make PaperTab. They included sensors capable of detecting when a corner of the device was bent, so that the flexing gesture could be used to turn the pages of an e-book.