Overview
Future Screen is a self-directed project based on the idea of decoupling screens from our devices. Phones these days are getting bigger and bigger, in order for the screen to display as much information as possible. But why do the screen and remaining hardware (processor, storage etc) have to be housed in the same device.What if instead we decoupled the screen from the rest of the hardware. And what if we leveraged the many open surfaces available around us, and allowed our information and content to freely move to the best surface available for the task at hand. Future Screen is an exploration designed to test this idea and see how well it can be applied to the many ways that we use our mobile devices.
Problem Statement
Carrying a large screen around has many drawbacks:
Weight/bulk – larger phones are heavier and don’t fit neatly into pockets.
Battery usage – driving a larger screen uses battery unnecessarily in scenarios that don’t require such a large display.
Cost – Larger screens are more expensive to produce, and to replace when they break.
Ease of use – Our thumbs simply don’t stretch that far!
Conversely, smaller screens also have their issues:
Limited space for information/graphical content.
Multi-tasking is effectively impossible.
Entertainment – smaller screens are very poor for watching movies or other content.
Ideas
What if the device and screen can be separated?
The screen itself could be lighter and thinner, and communicate wirelessly with the processor/hardware.
Processor and other hardware can then be upgraded independently of the screen.
We have lots of flat surfaces around us – is there a way we could use these in addition to our dedicated screens?
360 projectors in the centre of a room could effectively make any surface a screen. Information could move freely from one surface to another.
Advanced speech recognition and gesture recognition would all you to interact with any surface.
Places that you spend a lot of time (home, work) usually have their own screens anyway.