Manish Jethani's Blog » August 4th, 2006

A company called IO2 Technology based in San Francisco has created a multimedia projector called Heliodisplay that's capable of displaying video output from your TV, DVD player, or laptop computer, in thin air. Yes! A 30-inch mid-air display. The interactive version also lets you control the mouse pointer with your finger, turning the display into a virtual touchscreen.

Don't believe it? Check out the video.

I've always dreamt of this. Laptops are too heavy to carry around, and handheld devices are too limited in their UI capabilities. In the ideal world, you'll be able to carry your computer in your pocket - perhaps in the form of a pen - and when the need arises, you'll just pop up the display in thin air, get connected to the internet in a second, and look up that piece of information you need on the spot. Sort of like a pocket umbrella? Yes.

One wonders what the future of human-computer interaction looks like. We've been stuck with the WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing device) interface for too long now (invented at Xerox PARC in the '70s). Time to move on.

SMS is cheaper than phone calls in India, and there are quite a few PC-to-mobile SMS services out there. Here's one more: gofreeSMS. I saw this on Matt's blog the other day, and my initial reaction was, "Hmm... US-based." The only reason I did try it was that the UI's done completely in Flex 2.

Well?! It works in India too! I was able to send SMS to my Reliance phone. It shows the sender's name as "Emergency" for some reason (weird), but that's about the only complaint I have. Try it!