Chris Harrison, a Carnegie Mellon grad and employee of Microsoft, has been working on a series of products to make computers more mobile without making them larger, but with the benefits of a large screen.

“The central idea is that you can’t make mobile devices bigger without losing the primary benefit of mobility,” said Harrison. ” So, how do you make things [visibly] larger without making things [physically] larger?  Steal surface area from somewhere else.”

Although Omnitouch is just a part of his series of products that “steal surface area”, it’s the one that’s made a splash lately. Omnitouch uses a projector that sits upon the user’s shoulder to project the screen onto any surface the user chooses. Harrison’s Skinput project with a separate team worked on the idea, but also tried putting the screen on skin which branched into his Omnitouch project.

The use of touch screens seemed like wizardry back in the nineties and even just a few years ago, but now we could be moving toward a technology that allows anything to be a touch screen.