Besides product refreshes and innovations coming from some of the best-known names from the CE and IT fields, the International Consumer Electronics Show (a.k.a CES) is also the place where startups or lower-key firms unveil their latest innovations, which, in some cases, are a lot more spectacular than the novelties brought along by the big players. And that's also pretty much the case with the LightTouch interactive projector presented by a company called Light Blue Optics, since this little device is apparently able to turn just about any flat surface into a... 10-inch touch screen.

The Light Touch incorporates Light Blue Optics’ proprietary holographic laser projection technology (HLP), creating bright, high-quality WVGA resolution video images. HLP enables extremely wide throw angles, resulting in large images being created at close proximity to the projector’s aperture. HLP can also correct for distortion and optical aberrations in software, enabling novel table-top projection.

Light Touch includes an infra-red touch sensing system that transforms the projected image into a virtual 10-inch touch screen. The user can control the projector and interact with multimedia content and applications simply by touching the projected image.

The interactive projector runs Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 and also offers WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, thus enabling device to device communication and applications that connect directly to the Internet such as social networking, multimedia sharing and electronic point of sale. Furthermore, the Light Touch is equipped with 2GB of onboard Flash memory and has a Micro SD card slot that supports up to 32GB. Light Touch can be wall powered or battery operated, with a run-time of two hours before recharging is required.

Light Blue Optics’ CEO, Chris Harris, said that “At LBO, we believe that today’s consumer is no longer a passive viewer of multimedia content. People expect to engage, interact and share content and our first product enables them to do that in new and exciting ways. The opportunities for Light Touch extend beyond consumer electronics into retail spaces, the workplace and the home - profoundly changing the way people interact with multimedia content and the built environment. By enabling such diverse and compelling use cases, LBO aims to become the world’s leading supplier of miniature projection systems.”

Sadly, Light Blue Optics has not yet provided any significant pricing-related information, but we hope this product will really make it to the market, given just useful it might prove to be (especially if the price is right).


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