i can see it now
"Sorry, the cat walked in front of my computer and my keyboard disappeared."
Mozilla Labs is touting a phone-of-the-future that would project a keyboard onto tabletops and read keystrokes with infrared sensors. With a Friday blog post, Mozilla's research arm unveiled a concept smartphone dubbed Seabird. Cooked by New York-based designer Bill May, it's billed as "an experiment in how users might …
...but projected keyboards have been around for a few years already.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/techies/8193/
Overall the concept is a combination of existing ideas but I don't think I've seen so many bundled into one nerdgasm like this before.
While it worked, it felt unnatural, and the keys, particularly around the edges, were a bit unreliable.
It just didn't feel right with no physical keys, and the flatness meant that anybody used to typing got aching hands quite quickly. I never saw him use it much in the following months. It was a clever and an impressive gadget though.
I found a better solution for sending texts quickly was to link my (then) Nokia phone to my laptop by IR, but that would rather defeat the purpose when using a smartphone. I got a Palm Treo, installed Graffiti, and used that instead. I wish I could use a stylus and Graffiti on my current android phone (I know, both are possible, but Graffiti appears to have been pulled from the Android Market at the moment!)
The only thing that is really hindering this kind of pie-in-the-sky dream is the battery. Projecting light may not be all that expensive, electrically speaking, but the kind of holographic display in the picture looks quite energy-intensive to me.
In any case, it'll certainly put an increased load on an already severely limited power supply. Apparently, average talk time is around 4 hours now (source : http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/8069.html), with a few exceptions.
4 hours and all you do is talk. Radio is about the cheapest electrical application there is. You need very little power to send and receive. Set up a phone with holographic display and keyboard and you're upping the energy requirement by at least an order of magnitude.
So that means what ? Today's batteries would last 4 minutes ?
I don't know, and maybe nobody does, but I am sure of one thing : battery life needs to be dramatically extended before anything like this can give a day's worth of usefulness to the average user.
" Set up a phone with holographic display and keyboard and you're upping the energy requirement by at least an order of magnitude. ...So that means what ? Today's batteries would last 4 minutes ?" A 2d display of a keyboard is hardly holographic and would use very litlte battery power indeed. Plus the projections only work while it is in the dock and guess what ? The dock can be connected to the mains.....think before u type m8.
What amazes me is that there is no phone yet that does this.
Anyone who has been to the fosdem in 2009 has seen a technology demonstrator of this idea. Really cool. I tought they used the beagleboard for it, a pico projector from TI and that laser keyboard from thinkgeek.
So the idea works, the tech is there but a commercial phone product has not yet been created....
I really do not see the point....if you are linking your smartphone to a docking station, which has a conventional screen attached to it, might as well go the whole hog and attach, to the same docking station, a real keyboard and real mouse, which would surely be much easier to use than this "virtual" thing.
because I'm getting heartily sick of black slabs. These days, it's either a black slab, or a black slab with a little bump, or a black slab with a metal frame. I know the point of minimalism is that it's never supposed to go out of fashion but, in this case, I wish it would.
...their day never came - and it probably won't. VR / augmented reality / glasses displays / etc are limited not by electronics, which get cheaper and cheaper, but by optics, which don't. You're not going to be able to get a $50 display in your sunglasses any more than you'll get a $50 F/2.0 500mm telephoto.
No. VR glasses' day never came because they make you look a complete twunt.
For home consoling gaming, they make the whole experience very insular. Whilst this works for the hardcore of bedroom gamers, they don't work for social or casual gaming. They certainly don't work for ANY mobile application.
I'm sure if anybody thought they could actually SELL the damn things in any serious volume, they'd invest the R&D in finding ways to make it cheaper.
I actually did a review of one of these things a couple of years back for allaboutsymbian and if memory serves the device itself is still lurking in the back of the cupboard. Can't remember too much of the detail but the contrast in bright light was very poor. There were also some issues with the sensor picking up keystrokes and missing others but not as bad as you would think. It was a separate device that communicated to the phone via bluetooth but still managed to get a battery life of around 4 hours-ish - don't quote me on that though.
I think it would be possible to incorporate the technology into phones but it would add a fair bit to the bulk. As other posters have said, the drain *when combined with standard smartphone usage* would be too much for batteries as they stand now.
OK, fitting a micro projector, laser keyboard and a decent amount of processing power into a moble phone form factor would be 'future' in terms of scale, but all of the technology is already there, nothing new here...
http://www.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=laser+keyboard&wrapid=tlif12854931144712&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=ghGfTMnBG8TKswa1n5jmDg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=6&ved=0CEQQsAQwBQ&biw=1259&bih=633
...and they didn't even have to invest actual materials into an actual production line, for the thing.
Maybe it's also a testament to the value of peer review - at least, depending on the community of peers, and the subject under review. Designers proceeding unawares of the prior art to this item, and largely not inclined to actually analyze its design, might think - or, at least, might talk - as if it was the hottest new idea under the sun. I think, it's a waste of time and resources, and I think that some people living the "genius" stereotype probably do have too much free time on their hands - to which, I believe, this design may serve as a nearly tangible case in point.
Partly to show what *is* available, partly to show it is possible to *integrate* what is available into something that a person could carry.
Battery life is an issue but the biggest blocks on innovation are (potentially) a lack of funds and a complete lack of imagination.
Note that *many* design icons are made up of elements seen individually (and possibly a long time before) elsewhere.
Their iconic status is that they were the first to integrate the idea*
But yes I think St. Steve will invent this in about 5 years.
*Note I'm not saying *this* is iconic, merely that because its core bits have been seen elsewhere does not rule it out.
As this is a pie in the sky product I am going to make some wild assumptions about its capability.
When undocked to save power it is in a phone mode and has lower levels of functionality but when docked is just as powerful as a "standard" work laptop.
so if your a rep you can use one device for all things, the office doesn’t have to buy keyboard mouse and monitor just one device to cover all requirements and you don’t have to carry massive laptop bags everywhere.
But other then the funky multi function headset nothing here is new..... doesn’t stop me wishing I could get one.
I bought a Celluon laser-projected keyboard a while back. It works with my WinMo 6 phone, but not terribly well (not least, IIRC it was a bit slow at keeping up with typing speed) and only with beta drivers. I don't think the hardware was ever the problem. Sadly, for some reason, it didn't use the standard bluetooth HID profile - possibly because it was supposed to work as a mouse as well as a keyboard.
If anyone gets the drivers for these things working on Android, count me interested. No bluetooth keyboard has ever worked well enough on WinMo for it to be worth the effort to me.