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Comment by sksareen1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Would love to use this with my kids. I'm a VR skeptic, but novel variations of AR are always great to see.

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.

Happy to be corrected.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_keyboard

OK, maybe that's why all the downvotes? I'm not sure if you can point them at anything. They are bolted to the ceiling.

I've used projected keyboards that you can move around. We used those in hospitals. Little USB things.

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.

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