It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of a screen on a telephone that would allow you to see the person you’re talking to was something that seemed like futuristic Sci-Fi, but yet here we all are now walking around with mini computers in our pockets. Just when you thought smartphones couldn’t get any smaller, thinner, sleeker or more light-weight – how about an invisible phone?!
Humane, a startup founded by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, both of whom were part of the original design team for the first iPhone, with Chaudhri also having been a former head of design at Apple, has developed a new wearable gadget that has some AI-powered features that seem almost as unreal as a telephone with a screen seemed, way back in the day of wall-mounted, corded telephones.
A prototype of this device was demoed by Chaudhri during a TED Talk, last week at the 2023 annual TED conference in Vancouver, Canada. He wanted to share his vision for a future with AI where devices have a subtler presence in the form of wearables, and where screens are optional.
Among its most notable features, it includes a camera that can identify objects, and it can translate your voice into any language. You can also make calls that use a projected display on the hand, making it literally an invisible phone.
This device has not been officially announced or released to the public. But Zarif Ali, a Toronto-based freelance journalist, tweeted a visual of the demo in which Chaudhri took a call from his wife in the middle of the demo, simply by using his hand with a projection.
We don’t really know too much more information about this gadget. It doesn’t have a name, nor is there an expected release date. Humane has yet to release any more information about this device. So for right now, it’s a wait-and-see as to whether this new AI powered “invisible” phone/personal assistant will be the next generation of mobile device.
