TouchPico lets you project an Android screen onto any wall, control it with a stylus
Here's a novel way to control Android on a projector — A new Indiegogo is selling a Android-equipped pico projector which integrates an infrared pen to approximate a touch interface.
Context & Ripple Effects
The idea of projecting a computer interface onto a wall has been circulating for years — a 2008 New York Times piece looked at exactly this category of 'any flat surface' display — but what TouchPico adds is a working input layer: an infrared stylus that approximates touch on the projected image, running full Android rather than a closed media-player OS.
That OS choice is the quiet enabler here. Android's scale — described in June 2014 as the world's leading mobile OS with more than twice iOS's user base, and still growing its share of mobile Internet usage per Opera figures from January — gives a tiny crowdfunding team a free, familiar software stack, the same logic behind the Notion Ink Tegra Android smartpad experiment in late 2009. The campaign also lands at a moment when Indiegogo, fresh off its $40m funding round and world-expansion plans announced in January 2014, is pushing hard for exactly this kind of consumer-hardware project.
First-order effects
- Backers get a sub-$500-class device that turns any wall into a large Android screen with pen input — a form factor no mainstream vendor shipped in mid-2014, which is why the Indiegogo route exists at all.
- Indiegogo gets another flagship consumer-electronics campaign to showcase as it expands globally after its January $40m raise, competing directly with Kickstarter for the hardware-crowdfunding pipeline.
Second-order effects
- Because Android is free and ubiquitous, the differentiator between projected-computing products collapses to optics and input hardware — rivals must now match or beat the stylus-on-wall interaction rather than the software experience.
- Component suppliers of infrared pens, short-throw DLP engines, and ARM boards gain a new small-volume buyer class as crowdfunding campaigns repeatedly prototype this category ahead of established vendors.
Third-order effects
- If wall-as-touchscreen proves out beyond novelty, computing interfaces drift further off fixed panels toward any available surface — an early instance of the ambient-computing layer where the screen is wherever the projector points.
- Crowdfunding platforms consolidate their role as the de facto R&D lab for peripheral hardware categories, letting consumer demand signal which interaction models (stylus, gesture, touch) deserve OEM investment.
The trend: Projected user interfaces paired with cheap commodity Android stacks are moving 'the computer' off the device and onto whatever surface is nearest, with crowdfunding platforms seeding the category before incumbents commit.