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Holographic Cards

 Solitaire using projected cards
 
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For those with time to kill, plenty of electronic solitaire games are available in the gadget shops. However, to a one, they involve squinting at a squitty little screen and fiddling with tiny little buttons.

Siemens (see link) has produced a virtual keyboard that responds to typing on the projected image.

So, for those of us born before the Pokemon age, I propose the truly electronic pack of cards: the size of a real pack of cards, it will project a variety of Solitaire games onto any flat surface. You can then play the game much the same way you would on a PC, dragging cards with a fingertip, tapping cards to turn them over or double-tapping to clear the deck or deal.

Advanced versions can be linked to the Internet, so you can play Bridge, Hearts, etc. with online opponents.

Unlike real cards, of course, they will never get dog-eared, dirty or sticky, and are guaranteed to evoke cries of "Kewl!" from the assembled onlookers.

[I am not clear if the technology is up to a full color display; monochrome red might be a bit disconcerting.]

—DrCurry, Mar 12 2003

Holographic Keyboard http://www.siemens....rl=nop&sdc_langid=1
I am told it works very well, even on rough surfaces. [DrCurry, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]


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       I think the projection for the keyboard uses a laser and so for color, you would need 3 lasers. red green and blue. might be expensive. maybe one could resort to using older technology....
—phinch, Mar 12 2003
   

       In addition to only using a single color laser to project the keyboard, the projection is not drawn as a raster image, as in a monitor, but rather as a projection through a holographic film, much like the filters you can put over a laser pointer to project different fixed pictures. Making a scanning device to turn this into a full-color raster projection of decent resolution would probably be prohibitively expensive with current technology. Kudos for the idea, though. What I'd really like to see is a device with 2 such projectors: one to project the keyboard onto a desk, and a second to project a screen image onto the back wall of my cubicle.
—Freefall, Mar 12 2003
   

       Freefall, that would be seriously, um, kewl.
—beauxeault, Mar 12 2003
   


 

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