Shipping of Pre-orders of Touchjet Pond Projector To Start in 3 Weeks

Crowdsourced with nearly $900,000 in Indiegogo funding, the Touchjet Pond (formerly called Touchpico) portable interactive projector is now ready for sale, its makers said at a “sneak peek” live demonstration May 11 in London the day before its official launch in San Francisco. Touchjet is “the first consumer device that turns any flat surface into a super-sized touch screen,” the company claimed. The device is smaller than a paperback book, weighs only 9.6 ounces, has 20 GB of onboard and SD card storage, and batteries for two hours of beaming video up to 80 inches in size on any flat surface, it said. The projector is effectively a tablet, based on Android 4.4 and running any of 800,000 standard Android apps, it said. It’s controlled by a stylus pen used to touch the screen surface. This behaves like a traditional, capacitive touch screen, so almost any wall, table, ceiling or floor becomes a touch TV responsive screen or educational whiteboard, it said. The heart of the device is a light processing unit (LPU) affixed near the lens of the projector, which picks up infrared light from the stylus that’s reflected from the surface that’s acting as a screen. After one-time calibration to compensate for image distortion, the LPU translates the location of the user's gesture into a standard touch-screen signal. In the London demo, the image we saw was one of fully acceptable brightness, even with the demo held in a well-lighted room. The user has to remember not to come between the stylus and projector lens sensor, as that would block the infrared control. We observed only one brief lack of response to the stylus. U.S. pricing will be $599 when pre-orders begin shipping in three weeks, the company said. The company acknowledged that there have been “negative posts” from Indiegogo backers about delays in shipping. “We understand their frustration,” it said in a statement. But “we ran into a few unforeseen issues with our manufacturing process,” as can happen “with the first production run for any new device,” it said. “We are thrilled to be delivering the first batch of devices to our earliest supporters.”