Jordan O'BrienCE Pro Europe spends a lot of time covering home cinema projectors, and while some are better than others, they all offer roughly the same experience with varying levels of quality. Sony’s latest projector is different, as the Xperia Touch isn’t a home cinema projector – it’s an interactive touchscreen projector.
What exactly is the Xperia Touch? Well, that’s a difficult question to answer. Yes, it’s a projector, but no it’s not designed for powering a high-end home cinema. Yes, it commands a high price, at €1,599, but no it doesn’t support a 4K resolution, or even 1080p for that matter. What the Xperia Touch is, is a unique hybrid of devices. It’s part projector, part virtual Android tablet and part smart speaker.
The Xperia Touch does everything one would expect from a standard projector – it projects an image onto a surface using a laser light source and a lens. The difference here is that the image it projects can be interacted with. That’s thanks to the on-board cameras, which pinpoint exactly where a user’s finger is, and then uses that data to control what’s on screen. That means, unlike a standard projector, there’s no need to plug an external device in.
Sony wants users to interact with the Xperia Touch in numerous ways. It showcased how users would be able to utilise the projector in the kitchen, by looking at recipes without getting a screen dirty with mucky fingers. It can also be used to watch movies and TV shows on a wall, which may not need the touch functionality. It could also theoretically replace devices such as the Surface Hub for those looking for a giant interactive board.
There are a number of issues with Sony’s vision for the Xperia Touch. The biggest one is the fact that its resolution is noticeably worse than most mainstream tablets, at just 1366 x 768. There’s also a chance that objects that users are projecting onto could interfere with how the image is displayed, another problem users wouldn’t experience with a traditional tablet. With an ordinary projector, it would simply be used against a screen – but Sony envisions the Xperia Touch being used in table top mode quite a lot.
There’s also the issue with feedback. When touching a display users are fully aware if a touch has been registered or not, with the Xperia Touch those exact same interactions are unknown. Did the device register a touch input? Who knows, there’s no animation, vibration – anything.
That’s part of the Xperia Touch’s problem. It’s a unique device, but it’s one that doesn’t necessarily do anything better than the devices it hopes to replace. It hasn’t got the resolution or brightness to replace a home cinema projector, and it doesn’t have the responsiveness or the clarity to replace a tablet. The main thing it has going for it, is the fact that it’ll cost a whole lot less than buying a giant 80in tablet.
For those who are at least a little interested, then Sony has also packed in the Google Assistant for voice control and the 13-megapixel on-board camera can be used for video conferencing. That means Sony is likely looking at business users, rather than residential customers – although it’s still hard to see how it will convince either.