Thursday, November 02, 2006

The Next Big Thing

I remembered! I think. The other day I thought I had an epiphany of what the next big thing would be. Maybe it's not that big but I think this may have been it:

With LEDs becoming absurdly bright, with high-resolution display technology becoming absurdly small and cheap, and with more powerful devices in our pockets, I expect that in the near future, the device in our pocket will become quite powerful video projectors.

Imagine that you take out your pocket device (assuming you ever actually put it away), check your email and voice mail, make a call, and then it's time for the meeting to start. You tap on a couple of spots on it's interface, set it down on the table and a large, bright display is projected on the wall. It's corrected for the geometry of the projection and the wall so there's no distortion. You don't have to worry about all the tilting, propping, focusing, and repeatedly pressing a keystone button.

You advance your slides, control your movie, or perhaps live video feed from another conference room with either someone else's hand-held device, or a remote of some kind that's IR or BlueTooth. Or with voice commands.