Albatron pushes the envelope

ALBATRON HAD THREE new things that show the firm is thinking outside the box in a big way. On show were a pen, a scanner and a screen that no one else on the floor seems to have.

The first one is tentatively named the Smart Pen, and it is a dual use pointer with a webcam. You put the webcam facing the screen and the pen is tracked by it. It basically becomes a free form mouse you wave about as the camera tracks an LED on the pen.

Albatron Smart Pen

The second way to use it is a laser pointer that is also tracked by the camera. You point and the mouse follows in short order. There is some lag, but not enough to matter to anything but an FPS gamer. That said, the Albatron guys did play an FPS game with it, and it worked well enough.

It works to a screen size of about 150 inches with a usable angle spread of about 30 degrees. The remote has a range of about 10m, so it is good enough for most small or medium-sized rooms. The Smart Pen is currently in final development, expect the release version aimed at educational and business markets soon at a price of $299 or less. The specs may change a bit, but that is the development process.

Albatron flatbed scanner

Next up we have a product that is a little further out, months, not quarters, and is currently without a name. It is aimed at the educational/business markets, and it is a cheap scanner-like device.

If it looks like a 2MP video camera on a foldable arm, that is exactly what it is. It puts a video of any A4 or smaller objects that you put on the bed and displays them on whatever PC you are hooked up to. There is the usual scanner like software, with auto-everything including white balance.

This is a great example of taking existing technologies and turning them into an affordable product for markets that don't have a lot of money. This and a cheap projector, which along with the Smart Pen could make a pretty great package for classrooms.

Low cost multitouch panels, yay!

Last up we have a 22-inch touch screen monitor that does just about everything you would want a touch screen to do. It has multitouch, optical sensors and is cheap, nothing more to ask for really. The tracking was precise enough to draw a picture with a finger, and the multitouch worked just like the turtlenecked one would like.

The nice part is that the pricing on this technology is linear with size. Most touch screens get very expensive as screen dimensions grow because they have to coat the screen with expensive wires. This has sensor bars on the side and when you grow the screen, they only grow a little. The end result is an accurate touch screen at about 60 per cent the cost of a normal touch screen.

In the end, Albatron was showing off things that push the envelope. Nothing amazing, no fundamentally groundbreaking tech, just intelligent uses of commodity parts. The end result is better than the pieces, and that is never a bad thing. µ