Tag Archives: Pico projector

Mozilla Seabird is the smartphone of your dreams

Journey to a distant future with me, will you?  This is the Mozilla Seabird imagined by concept designer Billy May.  The smartphone’s specifications will make your eyes pop out.  Dual pico projectors can project images on virtually any surface.  When laid down on a flat surface or placed in a dock, the projectors can illuminate a QWERTY keyboard to provide content and interface simultaneously.  The embedded Bluetooth dongle doubles as a Bluetooth earpiece and IR pointer (with 1:1 IR tracking and haptic clicking) for manipulation of on-screen items in 3D space.  And isn’t the curved, ergonomic design to die for?

Now don’t get too excited there, partner.  Mozilla (yes, the company behind Firefox) has no plans to develop the Seabird, or any smartphone for that matter.  Billy May conceptualized the Seabird in this 3D rendering to support the Mozilla Labs Concept Series, a Mozilla-backed project that fosters the brainstorming of new ideas that “push the boundaries of the Web and the browser.”  The Seabird is May’s second attempt at an “open web concept phone.”  Since early 2009 he’s been listening to community feedback, and what you see in the 3D rendering above is the final result.  Salivating yet?

[Via MozillaLabs; Engadget]

LuminAR robot combines projector & camera for gesture-based interactivity, in a lamp

LuminAR, created by Natan Linder and Pattie Maes at MIT, combines a Pico-projector and camera inside a lamp-shaped robotic device to augment reality by beaming computational images onto a surface.  While the projector is there to display information and content from the Internet, the camera enables user-defined gestures.  Theoretically the LuminAR can be “screwed into standard light fixtures everywhere” meaning you might find such technology in a household lamp sometime in the (likely distant) future.  Watch Linder demo it in the video above.  Very Tony Stark/JARVIS-like, am I right?

[Via Engadget; YouTube]