http://lightblueoptics.com/products/light-touch/
If its not a screen make it one with a projector. Technologies are moving onto every surface. With a projector and software, interacting with computation can occur anywhere. It is really unimportant what the material is as long as it can have an image projected onto it, anything can be the new computer. The notion that any wall or surface can be a computer or interface with which to engage with computation establishes a value on the visual outcome of a computer. A computer and its interface can be boilded down to just light projected on a surface.
A computer is a type of machine and exisits with in the applied history and design spectrum of other machine. When a computer becomes just a screen or just light on a surface it neglects to recognize the importance of many aspects that make the use of a machine useful fun or engaging. Take haptics for example.
Haptics (pronounced HAP-tiks) is the science of applying touch (tactile) sensation and control to interaction with computer applications. (The word derives from the Greek haptein meaning “to fasten.”) By using special input/output devices (joysticks, data gloves, or other devices), users can receive feedback from computer applications in the form of felt sensations in the hand or other parts of the body. In combination with a visual display, haptics technology can be used to train people for tasks requiring hand-eye coordination, such as surgery and space ship maneuvers. It can also be used for games in which you feel as well as see your interactions with images. For example, you might play tennis with another computer user somewhere else in the world. Both of you can see the moving ball and, using the haptic device, position and swing your tennis racket and feel the impact of the ball.
(http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci212226,00.html#)
Light as a phonomonia is untangible. One can not touch light the heat they feel from lets say a light bulb is altogether a different sensation but the bodies ability to use the sense of touch to establish knowledge about an object becomes a strong and useful tool for interaction. Interaction with a projection on a wall or table or whatever just becomes interacting with light an altogether difficult thing. A user is not really interacting with anything rather the computer is recognizing the limited physical space to which is being projected and then compensating though the use of software and mostlikely infrared sensors located in the projector. This technology assumes that the interface of a key board is just too bulky and should be illiminated or disregarded as an experience from the interaction with the computer. However the interface and interaction with the keyboard is entirely a learned interaction and has been evolved from the collective consiousness of the typewriter and education itself. A vast and nuanced history that has both been accepted and retaught an established truth of interface. The QUERTY is not going to redically change but somehow the idea that the physical interaction with keys is unuseful for a user of a computer negelts the ablity of the brain to memorize phyiscal space and repeat actions known as muscle memory. The phyiscality of even the simple keys to which this post has been made would have been a much different experience for my hands if I were just to project the letters onto a surface. I would imagine that my fingertips would hurt after pounding them on to a hard surface and that I would have to use more of my sight in order to correctly locate my fingers over the keyboard. The ability of a keyboard to have sutle haptic clues allows me as a user to orient my self to the interface of the keyboard with much more ease. I am speaking of the tiny raised dashes on the f and j keys. Any thing projected can’t accomplish this nuanced yet setting and orienting feature of the keyboard.
I am dismayed by the thinking that a screen is that answer to all our needs when interacting with computation. What would a computer be if it was not screen? why do we need to interact with computation only in the visible sense? Why have computer moved away from the machines you engage and experience and into the the real of only see? All these question arise when I am confronted by technologies that imply and attempt to bring to truth that a computer is really just a screen when I think that it could be so much more such a better experience that light on a surface.
