HP announced the Sprout all-in-one PC last year and on paper it looks like a really odd combination of a 3D scanner and a projector thrown on top of a regular, Windows 8-running PC. That’s until you see it in action.
At a press event in Singapore, HP is demonstrating the Sprout PC and as you can see from the video (below), it completely blurs the boundaries between real and virtual worlds. The HP Sprout comes with an attachment on top that houses the object-scanning camera (14.6-megapixel HP High-Resolution Camera and the Intel RealSense 3D Camera) as well as the projector that makes the 20-inch, 20-point touch-enabled mat at the bottom a surface you can interact with.
The Sprout is already being used by creative professionals ranging from tattoo artists to tailors, to quickly digitise objects they want to incorporate in their next creation. Though everything that we saw in the demo can be done on a regular PC combined with cameras, the Sprout excels in reducing the friction and time that it takes to achieve the same tasks with a mouse and keyboard.
At the heart of the machine is a fourth-generation Intel core processor, 8GB RAM, Nvidia graphics, 23-inch full-HD touch display, and Windows 8.1, so you can remove the touch mat and combine it with a regular mouse and PC, but why would you want to do that when you can do stuff like this:
Disclosure: HP sponsored the correspondent’s flights and hotel for the media event at Singapore.
