This Augmented Reality Laptop Can Beam a 100-Inch Screen to Your Eyes
Laptop screens are usually constrained to 13 to 17 inches. But a new startup from ex-Magic Leap employees created a notebook that offers a 100-inch display beamed directly into your eyes.
Meet Sightful's Spacetop, which swaps a physical laptop screen for a pair of augmented reality glasses you wear to see the laptop’s expansive virtual screen.
“Everyone wants larger screens,” said Sightful CEO Tamir Berliner. “There’s no one who says, ‘Oh I’m buying a 14-inch laptop because I like 14-inch.’ They like the...small form factor, not the screen.”
Berliner’s startup has spent the past three years developing the Spacetop, which fuses AR tech with a PC. As you can see, it looks radical. By ditching the display, the laptop is essentially missing its top half, leaving only the keyboard, the CPU hardware, and a webcam near where the screen hinge would normally sit. To see the laptop’s display, you’ll have to don a pair of lightweight glasses built by AR developer NReal(Opens in a new window), which are connected to the PC by a cable.
The product may seem like a gimmick. But what sets the Spacetop apart from other AR or VR headsets is that it's easy to use. You don’t have to worry about learning new virtual reality controls. Once I put the glasses on, I immediately knew what to do, and used the Spacetop like I would any other laptop. For example, Google Chrome, Google Docs, and Gmail windows popped up on the eyewear, and I accessed them by moving the laptop’s trackpad and typing on the keyboard.
“We have not told you anything about how to use the product,” Berliner said. “So you are using an AR product, but it was intuitive.”
In fact, I conducted part of my interview with the Sightful team while wearing the glasses and using the
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