Phones with pico projectors never really took off. We’re not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s the lack of resolution, maybe it’s the extra size, or maybe the people who actually needed projectors were willing to invest in higher-quality devices. The Touchjet Pond is doing things a different way, turning pico projectors into giant touchscreen devices, allowing you to project a giant tablet screen up the wall.
Unlike other pico projectors that merely beam images up a wall, you can interact with the Pond’s projected display as if it was touchscreen. Sadly, it doesn’t behave like a regular capacitive touchscreen, so you have to tap and swipe onscreen with the included infrared stylus, which beams a light onto the display that the system tracks to determine what action you just committed.
The Touchjet Pond beams images up to 80 inches (diagonal) in size, although the resolution is a bit low at 854 x 480 pixels. If you can live with the sub-par detail, it does boast great color reproduction on top of a feature set that you don’t normally see in pico projection systems. Aside from the stylus, you can interact with the system using the included remote’s D-pad and “air mouse” system, the latter of which tracks the handheld’s movement and replicates it using an on-screen cursor. It comes with Android 4.4 KitKat, so it can run, pretty much, any app compatible with the platform, although the battery will only last for up to two hours of use (if the LCD lamp is set at 50 lumens, at that) before requiring a recharge. Details include a 1.66GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 2GB of RAM, 18GB of storage, and a size similar to larger phones but double the thickness.
Available now, the Touchjet Pond is priced at $599.