It seems that display-makers are counting on the flexible display market to blow up over the next few years as displays become possible in places where they were awkward or impossible before: wrapped around poles, embedded in cloth, and so on. HP and Arizona State University’s Flexible Display Center are the latest to come up with an incredibly thin display technology, though they’ve been beaten to the punch by several companies.

NovaLED and Vitex are working on a super-thin, flexible OLED display, and ITRI in Taiwan was prototyping one of these thing almost exactly a year ago, although its size was restricted. A big company like HP will have the clout to push products with their tech faster than smaller companies can license theirs to others, however, so the race is on.