High-Tech Coffee Table You’ll Never See
CNET is showing off HP Labs’ LCD touch-coffee-table prototype, which is cute but impractical. The idea is that you’ve got this giant LCD touch screen where you can load up a game of Monopoly with the tykes. Let’s say it’s a small coffee table, around the size of a 30-inch Cinema display. Add a decent touch screen to that, a big thick glass slab to protect it from coffee mugs, the actual computer to run it, and the coffee table itself, and this is a minimum $5k piece of hardware.
I say the exact same thing can be done for a grand, and be much more flexible. Picture something like those leather blotters people used to keep on their desks. It’s a big flexible or foldable plastic sheet that you can place on any desk or table. You can hook it up to any PC with a USB or BT connection, although it does nothing on its own.
Remember the TV tablets in 2001: A Space Odyssey that Dave and Frank watched the news on while they ate space food? That’s probably where the idea for a tablet PC came from, but why do they need to be a full PC. Let’s say these things are just super thin display panels with just enough hardware to display an image signal and no battery. You place these things on your “eBlotter” (or whatever) and they power themselves via induction (just like your electric toothbrush), report their location on the mat, and get back a video signal from it.
From there on, it’s just like shuffling papers around on a desk. You can throw down 3 or 4 of these things, open up a document/spreadsheet/webpage/whatever on each one, and shuffle them around side by side (or even overlapping) just like paper.
Maybe they’d even have a bit of flash memory in them that stores the document you’re viewing so you can pick it up and walk over to your coworker’s desk with it. You could probably even have varying types of tablets with different sizes and capabilities.
The point is that 2 or 3 8.5×11″ LCD touch panels are going to be cheaper, more useful, and less error-prone that a gigantic fucking coffee table tablet PC. I’d love to see something like this happen in the next 5 years, the technology is all there.
