AT&T has just finished showing off what it's cooking up in its labs, and one highlight is a little project called ShadowPuppets that might make you reconsider the usefulness of a pico projector smartphone. The idea is delightfully simple: use the shadows created by your hand to control your phone when projecting an image. Pinch-to-zoom is supported, but you can also just move your hand towards or away from the projector to zoom in or out, respectively. You can also swipe your hand left to right or up and down to pan and scroll, and you just have to point to click. In practice it all worked quite well and fluidly, though the demo only showed us interactions with the browser version of Google Maps running on an Alienware laptop. The hardware itself is decidedly a proof-of-concept — it's just a 1.3-megapixel Logitech webcam paired with a MicroVision ShowWX laser pico projector...
