Sony Xperia Touch

We're always on the look out for new interactive experiences in the consumer products space, so it was nice to discover Sony's Xperia Touch. It's essentially a short throw laser projector that turns any surface into a 23" high definition touchscreen.

It's an interesting approach to making your home interactive and taking experiences away from screens. It's not an entirely new technology, we wrote a post about Invisible Keyboards in 2011, which was a much smaller and more limited version of this.

The scenarios depicted in the Sony promo videos look fun but it would have been great to see more functional uses for it. The Xperia Touch lets you play games, explore Google maps, and play a virtual piano on any table top. It works on Android so you can run pretty much any app from the Google Play store.

The more useful examples showed a family making a Skype video call on the lounge room wall and interacting with a recipe on the kitchen bench without getting their recipe book dirty. The other examples are pretty much what you'd expect without much imagination.

The downside of this kind of approach would be the constant issue of having an object like your arm casting a shadow over the image, which restricts what type of app would work well on the Xperia Touch. For some apps like the recipe book, this might not matter but it's always been an issue with interactive projections. The other issue is that there's no sensory feedback, so you're reliant on apps that give you visual feedback on touch. Without it the lag in performance is more pronounced.

On the plus side, the image looks surprisingly clear even on a textured surface in daylight. Regardless of all this, it's just interesting to see how our homes are changing as time passes and technology advances.

Check it out!