Have you seen those keyboards made of light that detect your finger movements. If you have not, you are surely behind the times. A small laser projects the image of a keyboard on a nearby flat surface. When a person types into it, the movement is detected and converted to signals about which key the user was pressing. There are plans to integrate this system into cell phones in 1-2 years.
Projection of a screen on a nearlby flat dark surface is even easier there is no great DSP required. But projection of a touch screen works will with similar technology.
Idea : We just eliminated three perpherals of a PC : screen, keyboard and mouse. Imagine carrying a cell phone sized PC (I call it pocket PC) on which you can do anything ranging from watching movies to downloading pirated episodes of Scrubs to doing day to day job like emailing and reading news.
Progress : The light keyboard has already been invented. A light touch screen works on the same prinicple. However, a mobile phone sized device housing memory, a powerful processor, atleast 128MB RAM, efficient cooling device and wireless antenna is surely out of the world for atleast 4-5 years (10 years to be realistic). Even if the size gets reduced to this extent, the power consumption required will be humungous. Unless there is a revolutionary battery invented within this time, users will have to re-charge their PPCs every hour which sort of defeats the purpose.
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