By
Thomas Ricker 
posted Jan 7th 2010 8:29AM
Ever heard of a small company called
Light Blue Optics? Probably not. But it's companies like LBO that make events like CES truly worthwhile. Tucked away in a small suite overshadowed by the million dollar spreads owned by industry giants like Samsung and Sony is a tiny startup looking to attract the attention of OEMs with its full-color holographic laser projection technology. The Windows CE-powered Light Touch represents the company's very first effort to create an interactive projector that allows users to interact with the displayed image as they would a modern touchscreen display. Despite our skepticism, we came away suitably surprised -- impressed even. Granted, our hands-on was performed in a lowly-lit room on par with the lighting you might find in a fine restaurant. Still, the 15 lumens were effective at lighting videos and the touch sensitivity was far more accurate than we expected -- so good that we were quickly typing out phrases on the QWERTY with few mistakes (admittedly taking a reasonable amount of care to strike the right "key"). The projector only supports single-touch at the moment though multi-touch is just a software tweak away. See the video after the break and prepare to be suitably amazed at watching a laser projector create a touchscreen display.
