smart surfaces

I'm getting to know my Amazon Echo and although it's pretty cool, there are obvious uses of it that don't work too well because its only feedback mechanism is speech. Sometimes you just need a display - but you don't always have one handy.

My suggestion is to have a 360 degree projector in your room - either using a pan/tilt mirror (eg a laser projector projecting upwards from the top of a device like an echo) or using a hemispherical 360 degree mirror (probably ceiling-mounted) to have best all-round coverage.

A laser projector would be ideal, because it is always in focus.

The device would have to learn the shape of your room so that it can projection-map onto interior walls (and other surfaces) but that's a solvable problem. (Even if it doesn't use Kinect-like ranging, you could map a room simply by walking around with a cell-phone camera and a 3D mapping app)

Then when you need some text info or a diagram it can be projected onto the nearby wall. It would help a lot if the device had a camera (especially a kinect-like one) and was spatially aware of not just the room but the people in it, so it could choose where to display the info that would be where you could easily see it.

One implementation of this device could be as something that includes an LED light, and fits in a ceiling light-bulb socket, so that it would be easy to add to any room.

This system could also work as an input device by adding a camera/location sensor - it could project a menu onto a wall and select items by viewing your hand movements... (the camera/location sensor is probably needed anyway for mapping the room surfaces)

Note that an important part of this suggestion is that it can project onto any wall and that it corrects automatically for perspective. 360 degree projection and the use of arbitrary surfaces makes it quite a different thing from merely using a regular projector pointing at a fixed wall.