"Analysis: Sophocles' Pikachu-shaped computer"

TL;DR: That thing is not that much of a stretch from reality in engineering. Maybe a little bit of unobtanium is involved but it is on the roadmap of some tech giant and will be released very soon.The Pikachu-shaped computer Sophocles uses have the following features:Very small shape, battery operated,Projected touchscreen and touch keyboardCan connect to the InternetOther than the projected screen and keyboard, that small device fits the definition of modern smartphone to a T. Moto Z smartphone already get a DLP projector add-on so projectors on smartphone-class devices is also not unheard of.It is the touch on projected surfaces being hard to implement. Traditional touchable projected surfaces have special requirement to the surface the user interface is projected to for the finger tracking camera to work, but Sophocles' obviously don't have such requirement. My best guess to this technology is that stereoscopic cameras are used to track the user's fingers in 3D space and determine if the finger have touched the surface.Having 4 cameras on the same handheld device is also not unheard of. The only unobtanium here is the computation power and battery capacity backing up the two sets of stereoscopic 3D cameras, the computer vision algorithms and the GPUs running them, being packed into a package not larger than s smartphone. Sophocles managed to squeeze in a lot of computational power for computer vision into a smartphone form factor without breaking the physical size and power envelope of a smartphone.I have no experience with the Tegra X1 chips (the same used in Switch.) I believe that someone, probably nVidia, Qualcomm or AMD, will end up putting enough GPU power into one smartphone chip to support two simultaneous OpenCV-based stereoscopic camera operations without compromising the battery life. This will allow Sophocles' device to be built in real life. via /r/pokemon http://ift.tt/2szvWOw