This concept video by San Francisco design house Aatma Studios starts off pretty well: they envision future iPhones and iPads using a combination of a built-in pico projector and IR sensors to project a light-based keyboard on a flat surface. Just type on that projected keyboard as you would on any other and the iPhone will register your keystrokes.
So far, so good. I remember about ten years ago when I first bought a PDA thinking that just such a system would probably be the way these hiptop computers handled text entry in the future. This is plausible, especially considering Apple’s recent moves in the pico space.
Then it just gets kind of sci-fi stupid, though. Aatma takes the concept one step too far and imagines an iPhone that can actually project two-dimensional holograms in mid-air, no screen or surface necessary. Uh, yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not how projectors work. Still pretty cool, though.
[via 9to5Mac]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
