Image credit : Sightful
Human-computer interaction business Spacetop, a screenless “augmented reality laptop” that projects tabs onto a 100-inch virtual screen, is the first product from Sightful. The laptop, if you can call it that, consists of a full-size keyboard, a hardware deck, and a set of custom NReal glasses. While staying undetectable to others, the glasses project tabs in front of whatever the user is looking at.
Spacetop is in the same league as other smartphones that can already power AR glasses thanks to its Snapdragon 865 processor, Adreno 650 GPU, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. Its dimensions—1.57 inches high, 10.47 inches wide, and 8.8 inches deep—and weight of 3.3 pounds, which is comparable to several laptops we might name here—mean that it is not smartphone-sized.
Sightful is clearly gunning for a crossover hit in the the work-from-home-or-anywhere market. “Laptops are the centerpiece of our daily working lives, but the technology has not evolved with the modern, work from anywhere, privacy matters, ‘road warrior’ mentality. Meanwhile, augmented reality is full of potential and promise but is yet to find its daily use case,” said Tamir Berliner, Sightful co-founder who previously worked at both Leap Motion and Primesense. “We are at the perfect moment for a significant paradigm shift in a device we all know and love.”
Only 1,000 early adopters can currently purchase Spacetop through an application-based program. We don’t yet know how much this will cost you or when you can start using it, but we’ll be keeping an eye on this project to see if it succeeds where so many others have failed.
