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Lenovo looks to the future with smart concept technologies at Lenovo Tech World

By Koh Wanzi - on 29 May 2015, 6:55pm

Lenovo looks to the future with smart concept technologies at Lenovo Tech World

Image Source: Lenovo

Lenovo Tech World was all about the future, with a focus on innovation and the need to create even more seamless user experiences by integrating both hardware and software into a unified ecosystem. The company took the opportunity to demonstrate several key concept devices and technologies, underscoring its vision for future products and services as devices and people become even more connected.

Virtual screens for smartwatches

Image Source: Lenovo

Given the proliferation of smartwatches, it should come as no surprise that this was one of the concept products demonstrated by Lenovo. The Chinese manufacturer envisions something called Magic View, a virtual interactive display that effectively gives users a second screen. Smartwatches are often constrained by their small screen sizes, and Magic View aims to address this by bypassing the physical limitations of a regular watch face with a second, virtual display.

Optical reflection will be used to create the virtual image, and users could see a virtual display more than 20x larger than conventional watch faces. This would make it easier for users to follow a map and view photos, all things that can already be done on smartwatches today.

Built-in projectors

Image Source: Lenovo

Lenovo also presented Smart Cast, a solution to turn smartphones into veritable mini-PCs. While smartphones today are geared towards content consumption instead of production, Smart Cast changes things by equipping phones with a built-in laser projector, infrared motion detector and high-performance algorithms. Smartphones could then become even more interactive as users gain the ability to project virtual touch screens onto any surface and type with a virtual keyboard. This could significantly boost productivity as users have more screen real estate – albeit virtual – to work with.

This even opens up possibilities in entertainment as smartphones could project entire movies and games onto walls. The good part? This may not be as far away as it seems. At Tech World, pianist Lang Lang played The Entertainer on a virtual keyboard. There was even a full-size music sheet displayed from a smartphone projector.

Connected shoes

Finally, Lenovo demonstrated its Smart Shoes concept, an Internet of Things (IoT) product that uses the cloud to integrate hardware, software and applications to display a range of information. Smart Shoes could display a person’s mood on screen and even track and analyse fitness data like heart rate and caloric consumption. In addition, it would be able to provide maps and directions to places.

With so many diverse applications in one device, the Smart Shoes concept fits with Lenovo’s IoT cloud strategy which aims to pool innovation and expertise in diverse areas into an ecosystem with an open SDK platform.

If these concept designs and projects are anything to go by, Lenovo is a company that is very much in tune with the industry zeitgeist. IoT devices and the growing prevalence and capabilities of mobile devices are here to stay, and Lenovo is definitely looking to get ahead of the game.

Source: Lenovo

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