With HP’s new Sprout, we’ve literally gone back to the drawing board as far as what a computer can do. Yes, there’s a high-end all-in-one PC at the core of the $1900 device, announced Wednesday at an event in New York. But HP extends the Sprout’s capabilities by adding powerful imaging and touch technology.
In a truly innovative stroke, the Sprout includes a second “display” that’s actually a touch-enabled surface called a Touch Mat. Think of it as a virtual sketchpad: Using your finger, you can select an image from the main display, flick it down to the Touch Mat, and manipulate it with your hands—no mouse or keyboard required. It’s a daring bid to reinvent how we use computers, built by a company that’s trying to reinvent itself as well.
Image: Melissa Riofrio HP’s new Sprout PC merges imaging and touch with traditional computing for a new kind of digital experience.
Going from thought to experience
HP calls the Sprout an “immersive computing platform.”
“We got this notion of going from thought to experience,” says Eric Monsef, HP’s vice president of Immersive Systems. “What kind of experience could I get with two screens and touch?”
The second screen—on the surface below the 23-inch, 10-point touch display of the PC portion of the Sprout—is the Touch Mat. It’s a 20-inch, 20-point touch surface that looks like a huge mousepad. Older folks might liken it to a desk blotter.
Image: Melissa Riofrio The HP Sprout’s Touch Mat is the “second screen” that can be used for display, scanning, or image manipulation.
The touch technology is embedded beneath the mat’s surface. That surface, Monsef says, was designed in partnership with 3M to be extremely durable: “It’s scratch-resistant and cleanable, even permanent markers.”
The other innovation on the Sprout is the Illuminator, a set of imaging technologies built into an arm that extends over the top of the PC display. It incorporates a 14.6-megapixel digital camera, a DLP projector, and Intel’s RealSense 3D camera. The RealSense camera lets the Illuminator take scans of objects that look more three-dimensional than a conventionally scanned image.
Image: Melissa Riofrio The HP Sprout’s Illuminator includes a digital camera, a DLP projector, and Intel’s RealSense camera for 3D imaging.
Brad Short, a Distinguished Technologist with HP, showed me how all these parts worked together. “To the PC,” Short says, “the Touch Mat is a second monitor with touch.” HP even bundles an Adonit Jot Pro stylus to use with the Touch Mat (a standard keyboard and mouse also come with the Sprout).
Short booted the Sprout, and it went straight to Workspace, an HP interface that overlays the Windows 8.1 interface. (Short told me that HP had to cajole Microsoft into allowing a direct boot to something other than Windows’ own Start screen.) The Sprout will launch with a few third-party apps. The company is releasing an SDK Wednesday, and hopes app developers will find new ways to take advantage of Sprout’s capabilities.
Image: Melissa Riofrio The HP Sprout’s Workspace unites images from the scanner or other sources for your use, and it’s also an interface for HP and third-party apps.
For now, we had fun scanning and manipulating images. The Touch Mat is the Sprout’s scanning platen, and the Illuminator is the overhead scanner, in a form factor similar to what I saw in 2011 on HP’s TopShot LaserJet Pro M275. That product’s overhead scanner and scanning surface create 3D-like images that can be printed or saved as image files.
Short told me that the TopShot product and Sprout were developed in parallel, but they’re not closely related: “Same philosophy, different solution and experience,” he says.
Image: Melissa Riofrio HP’s Sprout uses Intel’s RealSense camera to beam line patterns over objects and create images that look three-dimensional.
Having seen both, I can confirm the fundamental differences in approach. The TopShot’s overhead camera takes multiple shots to create its 3D-like image. The Sprout, using Intel’s RealSense camera, projects different line patterns over the object (it’s mesmerizing to watch) and reconstructs what HP calls a “3D snapshot” based on the pixels the camera sees.
Short scanned a few small objects and showed me how you could take, say, an everyday award certificate and scan it, then scan a real prize ribbon or even a flower, and put all those images together to customize the certificate.
Image: Melissa Riofrio Take an ordinary document, scan it, scan some other things, put them all together, and you have a customized image arrived at very intuitively.
The scanned images appeared in the Workspace on the PC’s display. Short used a quick, completely intuitive motion that HP (and any human being) calls “flicking” to move images with his finger from the display to the Touch Mat. Once there, he cropped, resized, and moved images to customize the certificate. Workspace will collect images from the Web or imported files, not just scans.
HP also showed me how the Sprout can be used as a collaboration tool. Short set up an image on his Sprout’s Touch Mat, while colleagues set up a free app called MyRoom on an HP Android tablet and an adjacent Sprout demo unit. As Short manipulated the image and wrote on his Touch Mat, his colleagues could see what he was doing on their devices. They could also see images of each other, as you would in a traditional conferencing app. “We see Sprout as something to bring people together in an immersive way,” said Short.
Image: Melissa Riofrio A free MyRooms app lets the HP Sprout work as a collaboration tool, allowing colleagues to share an image and interact online.
The Sprout does things no other PC does. That could make it a game-changer—or it could trap the Sprout in a niche. But HP’s Monsef says the company is committed to developing the Sprout concept over the long haul. “This is just one product. We have a vision,” Monsef promised.
HP is taking a careful approach to launching the Sprout. It plans to seed a few hundred Sprouts to beta users—“makers, techies, educators” is how Monsef described them—so HP can “listen and learn.” It’s taking preorders for the Sprout’s ship date of November 9, and it also plans to set up HP-staffed, in-store Sprout shops in 50 Best Buy stores and 30 Microsoft stores nationwide.
I don’t know whether the Sprout will take root (sorry!). But I do know that its invitation to create using our hands merges the virtual and the real in a way that could make computing easier, and perhaps even inspiring.