Not sure why the skeptics are all down on this - I think this is awesome. If nothing else it's a great POC product that will get imitated and integrated into other ecosystems (can imagine Google incorporating this into the next Home device), and opens up the world. No use case? Ever needed to watch something, or show something but lugging around a 30'' screen wasn't an option? You can make ANY surface an interactive input device and screen. From consumer to industry applications I see a lot of potential.
If they make this a key product it could grow, but if Sony licenses it out (yes I know they're not really big on that), it could open us up to a whole lot of applications and integrations.
The test, of course, is to imagine a similar multi-person touchscreen product coming from Apple. Or HP. Or Google. Or Microsoft.
Think about how each of those 4 companies' reputations prejudices the emotional idea for this product.
It's not just a thought experiment; Apple has the big iPad which is still pretty small for people to crowd around, but its bigger than the other iPads, and there have been multi-player single-iPad games since pretty early on. HP has the HP Sprout, which has a slightly larger area compared to the big iPad but isn't really targeting multiple users, though it does feature a camera + projector combo that the Xperia Touch also uses. Google has the Jamboard, which is based on a 55" TV, and was recently announced as being $5000 for the TV, plus $1200 for the matching stand. The Microsoft Surface Hub is probably the oldest product after the iPad, and that goes for around $10k.
Any attempts to go beyond the individual/single-person experience of the iPad have not yet broadly succeeded. Price is an issue, but also portability - smart whiteboards exist, but beyond installed systems, there has been no wider adoption. If this product is able to drive wider awareness of the concept, I will be happy to kill pen and paper, chalk and chalkboard, dry erase marker and whiteboard.
I can see this in medical environment where you want to isolate physical contact on easy to clean surfaces (granted the device is also locked in place securely to avoid snitchind)
We use touch enabled projectors in schools all the time. That technology is way over five years old. I can't remember the last time I saw a classroom without it.
The first thing my 5 year old son does when he gets to school is to drag is name into the school dinner part of the board -- registration and meal choice all in one.
I wonder if they make a clean room version of this? Would be neat to have in hospitals and theatres (for surgery) and in the hospital clean rooms (labs etc)
I was always under the impression that those devices in schools weren't capable of making any surface touch-sensitive, but rather only the whiteboard itself, using sensing on the whiteboard (IR touch?).
This Sony device seems to enable the former, however.
In fairness to the OP, there are other devices out there that do make any surface touch-sensitive, such as projection keyboards[1]. I remember seeing those devices being released more than a decade ago, thinking these kinds of devices would be the future. It has surprised me it's taken this long for the next evolution of this product to come to market (possibly due to licencing issues with IBM?) but it's really exciting now that it is finally here.
I like the concept. But the box is too large and the projector output doesn't seem to be enough. I have a 3M Streaming projector which is 60 lumens, this Sony product is 100. The 3m is not usable at all with any normal lamp on, daylight from a window renders it completely useless.
Bump it up to the ~300 lumen range then it might become useful.
Having used the ASUS P2E (300 lumens) virtually every day for the past 3 years in place of a television, I completely agree that 100 lumens is pretty low for a box this big. The latest models from ASUS such as the P3B (800 lumens, ~3hr battery life) better demonstrate what's currently possible for that form-factor and within the that price range.
Touch input aside, I feel like portable/LED projectors are a very promising avenue for Sony to explore. They are very convenient and incredibly dinky compared to big old clunky flat-panels (aka "black mirrors").
Because the pictures are bullshit. You can't have a projector showing a white image on a dark surface, and they have a countertop example which displays white letters and a white picture on a black marble countertop. Physics literally don't work like that.
You mean the piano and math pictures? The finish on those surfaces makes both of those easily possible (I also don't think that countertop is marble). You can see the reflection of a white light on a finished marble countertop. Black under ambient light != always black, even under a directed light source.
The finish is the problem. Glass is a clean, smooth surface for touch. Walls and wood aren't. The odd tap is fine, but any app that relies on a lot of dragging is going to feel unpleasant, for at least some users.
Looking at it I can only be disappointed in science fiction's failure (specifically tv and movies) to move beyond Minority Report inspired glass touch screens.
I wouldn't necessarily blame science fiction as a whole, but the moreso the concept artists or directors for sticking with physical touch screens. And while many may think of Minority Report as the innovator for interfaces, the current Avengers' Tony Stark has a holographic interface that he manipulates in space.
(I'm just as excited as you are because I had the same idea in middle school, but until a manufacturer like Apple implements it in a flagship device, I'm just considering this a novel gadget. And as another aside, I always thought the idea of moving screens the way Tom Cruise does as super tiring--lemme just nudge that Thinkpad nub.)
Why be disappointed? Reverse projecting onto a 'glass' panel would be better UX, with this your hand can interrupt the beam of the projector obscuring the picture.
This looks like one of those products that would be extremely cool if it worked as well as advertised, but also not likely to do that (which is a recurring theme with the so-called "Weird Sony"). I once tried that "projection keyboard" in a Sharper Image store at the mall and it seemed to register about 20% of my keypresses. It's totally possible the tech has gotten better since then, but I'll wait to see reviews before I spend any money.
Yeah, apparently IBM engineers built a projection keyboard back in 1992. It's not surprising we haven't seen it sooner because of detection issues like you mentioned.
I've heard from a friend who tried one at electronics store here in Japan where they're on demo that it worked really well, he tried 10 finger multi-touch and everything.
Combining a projector with a touchscreen and Android. Sounds like a bad idea until you see the person cooking while scrolling through a recipe on the counter.
In every kitchen of every home I've ever lived in, counter space has been a premium. A tablet affixed to the wall is a lot more practical for 1/20th the cost. But I suppose if you can afford this gadget, you are probably not wanting for kitchen counter space.
I mean if all you want to do is scroll through recipes in a browser, you could get away with one of those ridiculously cheap chinese tablets that cost like $30.
Or a first gen nexus 7, they're piss cheap now too.
Yeah I didn't find out the cost of this thing until sometime after I'd commented.
I guess if the tablet used leap motion like sensors for gestures that might work otherwise you'd have the issue of messy hands (common state while cooking).
Yes I think it is much cooler than VR. This would be used every day. No one is going to use it on a table to to play the 2 half decent games it can do /snark. But in the kitchen in the wall mode, with some good Google Assistant integration. Vs VR? No one uses VR everyday. However the cynic in me guffaws at the VR price level. Jesus Christ. Way to much. At least with an ok VR rig I have a general purpose computer to use or put to work. Maybe I'm wrong but I can see this being used everyday in the morning and evening. It would become a fixture. VR only exists for gaming. No one is going to put VR goggles on every day to watch the news or check the time.
> VR only exists for gaming. No one is going to put VR goggles on every day to watch the news or check the time.
False dichotomy. There's a huge range of potential and real applications for VR that are neither games nor "watching the news".
Pop back here when you've tried SoundStage, TiltBrush, some decent social VR, CAD or interior design in VR, some high-quality VR storytelling experiences, training/education VR, historical reconstructions, music visualization, data visualisation, a physics sandbox, visual programming, interactive character animation etc.
That's a sad thing about sony products. I know they can justify the prices due to high R&D costs but it makes it difficult for the average consumer to purchase their products (I'm fairly sure I'm not their target). For example, I went to the Sony showroom in Japan in 2006/7(?) and they had a cool bluetooth speaker that rolled around based on the music it was playing. The problem is it was ~$350.
I started having a good opinion of Sony while ago, when I knew how they behave [See Sailfish OS and in general their openness (not complete at all, but better than others one) regard android platform]. I hope the better for them.
Sony Mobile is still somewhat separate from Sony itself I believe, since the Sony Ericsson days when it started out mostly the old Ericsson mobile team. E.g. they still have development in Sweden (although with continual layoffs).
Back in the day Sony Ericsson and Sony were night and day. Sony made DRMed ATRAC players, and Sony Ericsson made walkman phones thst would let you Bluetooth MP3 files between phones right from the music player.
I dont understand the skeptics its amazing to have a company such as Sony in the engineering and product design landscape doing things like this. I believe they have always been the best product company in the world, they might have shitty marketing and sales spitch but comon, the Vaio were a marvel of computers, sleek looking with nice specs, the Aibo is probably the greatest consumer product ever created and a marvel of imagination, their phones were precursors noticably the xperia compact were the only phones on the market that provided high-end performance for a small size (later to be copied by apple btw), the playstation is an amazing system and has always been, actually most of their product range is amazing, their cameras are the best on the market (the sony A7S is a marvel of engineering), their 4K Ultra Short Throw Projector is crazy as well. Really we owe much to this company and for me this has always been the only giant that I ever respected.
The website makes it look, essentially, like a 1.500 € toy.
I don't need a touch screen to watch a movie with a projector, I can use a whiteboard to write messages, I can even point a projector at a white board (which is common for teachers to do). I don't think I would ever put such an expensive device in the kitchen while cooking.
I'm all for innovation, but this does seem like a bit of a solution in search of a problem. I guess you could say the same about VR, and now they're coming up with good business cases for it, but VR hasn't been touted as a consumer device from day 1, it's only now after some time that it's reaching the common man.
No, it definitely has huge uses. Mostly on a wall though. It's a massive portable touch screen. Think of demos. The problem is glare, you'll need to dim the lights to use it.
Exactly. Even as an electronic musician, I find myself going as tactile and kino as possible when trying to be expressive. Anyone can sequence notes, and notes don't make music. This will be good for producers, but not much value to musicians.
Exactly. My usual workflow is to build out my songs on a physical instrument (Guitar for the main chords -> a keyboard for the melody), then sequence them in Ableton.
It just feels more "natural" to create something new on a physical instrument
When the price comes down, I can see this having potential. Beam recipes up on the kitchen splashback, or household notes on a wall in the kitchen, table-top games for the kids, office status board on whichever wall suits. No need to wall-mount a display or connect a projector to a PC.
There are obvious limitations, even if they never improve the contrast, there are still a lot of decent use cases.
This reminds me of the very cool research of Chris Harrison, a professor at Carnegie Mellon. Lots of interesting work thinking about different ways to interact with computers. http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/Welcome
Somewhat similar, Sony's project T http://www.futurelab.sony.net/T/ has a popup demo at 717 Market street during business hours. Anyone off the street can drop by. They have several other demos installed.
I have no idea how well this works in real life. But if the interactive surface is even close to what the video shows then isn't a big portion of the microsoft future concept video [1] fulfilled?
I'm especially interested in the walk by, weather/clock feature. Instead of mounting an iPad/LCD on the wall I can just drop this on some furniture and have the same "persistent display" experience. Having my calendar display would also be very helpful.
This looks way better than sitting in a dark conference room with a projector, trying to describe to the person projecting what you want them to do on their laptop.
Projectors don't need to be as high-res as screens, the pixels spread out in the same way as a torch-beam does so you don't get blockiness (and extremely fine resolutions would be lost), and with the applications this would be used for why would you need more precision than 720p? People obsess on resolution too much, probably because it's a nice simple number to compare.
Same goes for 3GB RAM.. what will this need loads of RAM for? Isn't it basically an external display combined with cameras and gesture input/processing? [EDIT TO ADD] maybe I'm wrong about this, I thought it was a peripheral but it seems to be standalone.. although the example apps don't sound very taxing.
I agree with the general point about Sony designing with cheap components etc but can't see how it matters in this instance.
I feel like 720p/3GB would be capable enough for most basic Android utility apps, and some social media, which appears to be the use case they're targeting here.
A bad touchscreen. Every touch I see has the appropriate fingers overextended and the others tucked away, as you would expect from a vision system. We forget how much we hated touch screens before Apple made one that works well.
If they make this a key product it could grow, but if Sony licenses it out (yes I know they're not really big on that), it could open us up to a whole lot of applications and integrations.