Last year at Flashforward, Bill Buxton demonstrated some prototype displays based around miniature laser projectors that could be used on any convenient surface. He suggested this could be one approach to making devices smaller without resorting to unusably small displays (or Brazil-style magnifiers everywhere.)

In case you’re a previous Flashforward attendee wondering what became of this, we’ve been keeping an eye out for examples of this technology ever since, and now Siemens has shown off a phone with a version of this concept in place.

There have also been several demonstrations of laser-traced virtual keyboards, so essentially the same approach for solving the input problem on a mini device. (And we first heard about these at a Flashforward long ago, during a presentation by Yugo Nakamura if we recall correctly.)

But lasers aren’t the only solution fighting to become the future: for output there are roll-up displays, mini projectors, heads-up displays and text-to-speech software. For input we have mouse gestures, camera gestures, voice recognition, tilt-detection and good old handwriting recognition (…we are unapologetic Newton enthusiasts.)

Flash context? How about this: scalable, adaptive interfaces seem like a must-have for any solution that will utilize any subset of these I/O options, and as Flash gains a foothold in today’s small devices, it may be well-placed to power those interfaces.

But really we just couldn’t help geeking out on this stuff for a few minutes. Thanks for understanding. Hit the comments and tell us what we forgot to mention…

(Links via Gizmodo etc.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2005 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.