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A radical approach to computing

Humane if you remember, had an ad that left a lot people head scratching. Vague and cryptic, Humane might have been working on something with projectors?  John Gruber of Daring Fireball in July 2022 described the device as

a sort of button you wear on your chest. The button is equipped with a camera and lidar to see and record the world, recognize hand gestures, and maybe uses lasers or something to project an interface onto surfaces like your hand.

Inverse’s Ray Wong writes that a video from a recent Ted Talk where Imran Chaudhri, co-founder, demos the actual thing.

It does appear as described by Gruber, a small device with a pair of cameras (maybe lidar) that is picking up on certain hand gestures. Wong notes that the device is AI-powered. I recall years ago, Walt Mossberg making the case for a future where we have ambient computing. He talked about computers would be in walls, always on, and voice activated. Well, it appears a first step away from the ubiquity of smartphones — a computer with a screen that is always on your person, is a computer without a screen on your person.

Chaudhri makes an interesting statement about a screen less future:

For the human-technology relationship to actually evolve beyond screens, we need something radically different

Certainly it would be a radical approach to computing.

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