One of the problems with working on-the-go is privacy, whether for teachers grading in a café where confidential student information might be seen by others, or high-flying designers seeking to avoid industrial espionage on a red-eye. And it’s not only workers who need to keep data away from prying eyes. Simply watching a film with a non-PG rating on a train where children are roaming, could raise eyebrows. In fact, anyone who has ever had the uncomfortable feeling that someone is looking over their shoulder at their device’s screen will be interested to hear about a new “screenless” laptop with a new 100-inch virtual display that only the user can see.
With offices in Tel Aviv, San Francisco, New York, and Taipei, Sightful is a 2020 start-up whose Israeli CEO and co-founder, Tamir Berliner, played a key role in Magic Leap’s augmented reality. Berliner and his Sightful COO and fellow Israeli co-founder, Tomer Kahan, may look and sound uncannily like a tech bro Tweedledee and Tweedledum, with a website that publicises with no shame how their “team chat is 60% GIFs, 20% GenAI images, 20% actual words.”
Despite this cringe-worthy “you-don’t-have-to-be-crazy-to-work-here” vibe, the pair are being credited by reviewers from respected outlets like PCWorld, Wired, and Future with knocking Meta’s output and Apple’s Vision Pro into a cocked hat, with “a game-changer” product hailed as the “future of computing.”
Spec and cost
Dubbed the Spacetop, that product is a hardware-software combo generating a massive virtual screen that curves around the user thanks to a pair of custom, augmented glasses. In Minority Report style, users can interact with the air-screen, pinning windows to their own preferred layout, resizing objects, and tasking via most common Windows and web applications and the AOSP (open-source Android) operating system. Hardware-wise, it requires an Intel Core Ultra 7/9 processor with Meteor Lake architecture or newer.
Some reviewers have been shocked by Spacetop’s price point. It costs $899 (around €788) with an additional annual software subscription of $200. Prescription lenses ($50 for single vision, $150 for progressive, with a range from +6.00 and -9.00) are available for those whose own eyesight is less than optimal.
Travel advantages
Admittedly these costs are hardly a snip but as a tech accessory focused on corporate productivity, the screen’s invisibility to others is just one of the Spacetop’s distinct advantages.
Other benefits include the fact that the giant screen can be taken on trips without adding any more luggage weight than the 106-gram eyewear headset. It occupies just 146 x 175 x 44mm, unfolded.
Reviewers also love the top-loaded view which means the bottom third of the “screen” remains “empty” so that users can still see their surroundings. This reportedly reduces the sense of motion sickness that AR headsets can sometimes create. There’ll be no accidentally kicking someone’s dog or tripping over a handbag either.
What’s more, the device boasts a travel mode which boosts motion tracking, as well as a cursor that moves with and predicts the headset wearer’s eye movements, so leaving one’s mouse behind when out and about becomes a risk from the past.
The same goes for chiropractor bills, if, like this writer, would-be users suffer with neck pain caused by looking down at a regular laptop screen. Meanwhile, the pains that come from rubber-necking other people’s less futuristic screens remain the user’s own problem.
