Meet Spacetop, a radical new laptop with no screen

Sightful’s Spacetop AR laptop is brought to you by the chief executive behind the Microsoft Kinect

- MARK HACHMAN

Laptops have a problem: the screen. There’s only one, and it’s too small, too far away, and too public. Sightful thinks it’s solved that problem with the Spacetop, a laptop that gets rid of the screen entirely and uses augmented reality to create a 100-inch virtual display floating in front of your face.

And you know what? It works.

It’s immediately apparent that something is different. Clamshell laptops fold flat and thin; the Sightful Spacetop looks more like a rubberized, squarish calzone, wrapped in the sort of protective cover you’d see enfold an Apple iPad or Amazon Kindle. Unfold the cover, and what makes the Spacetop special is revealed: a pair of thin, tethered, augmented glasses that sit where you’d expect to find the laptop’s display planted.

Put simply, the Sightful Spacetop is designed for business travelers who want a laptop with a massive, private “display” that no one else can see. Put the glasses on, and a massive, curved virtual monitor appears before you, reaching above, below, and to the sides. You can pin and resize windowed apps: Gmail, YouTube, Word, Microsoft Teams. The Spacetop is a device you could use on a plane flight (if you don’t mind the odd looks), in a business or airport lounge (ditto), or even working in a conference room where you’d like a bigger screen.

Priced at $2,000, the Spacetop is purpose-built as a business tool, with an optimized Arm processor, AOSP (opensource Android) operating system, and, of course, the custom headset. But you’ll need to act fast: Sightful is inviting just 1,000 early adopters to purchase the final hardware, enticing them with the opportunity to provide feedback on subsequent products