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Hello MEMS, Goodbye Monitors
ftantil writes "In this article Bob Cringely says traditional monitors (CRTs *and* LCDs) will eventually go the way of the Underwood. I've always liked the idea of seeing the image equivalent of a 27" monitor by looking into a slot in my cellphone, but it never occurred to me that these things could replace TVs too."
Optimally we would get something that comes in rolls and can be cut to size. Then you just stick a piece of fiber on it anywhere, and have it communicate with you optically. Every pixel should have its own driver circuit, and they should speak to one another with various shortcut buses woven throughout the material. It should also be capable of speaking to other pieces of the material if you make it overlap. This way we could have large (if initially slow) displays. Then you just need a discovery method to determine the properties of the display, and a resolution-independent display method.
In the meantime; I don't want an empty box. If I have a MEMS-based display, it had better be painting the image directly onto my retina, which is much more useful anyway. I'm willing to put on goggles, though that shouldn't be necessary; within a certain (smallish) range of motion it should be able to track me just fine.
If we DO use a MEMS mirror-based display, we should be using a large number of mirrors to minimize the depth of the thing and also to maximize refresh rates.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So one company seems to be holding all the patents. I'm not holding my breath waiting for the prices to 'plummet'.
The cable giants and the MPAA will love retinal displays because that means they can finally charge "Pay Per Viewer." No more of those digital pirates bringing 30 friends over to watch the latest boxing match. Now every pair of eyeballs can be individually billed. Of course that would also mean the death of movie theaters because Hollywood will be able to charge you at home for each one of your little urchins when Harry Potter X comes out.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
There's an I, Cringely Slashbox (which I have activated). Doesn't this obviate the need for every column he writes to be submitted as a story to /.?
deus does not exist but if he does
I don't see why everything has to run on/off your cell phone. I just don't get it. They bug me enough when they go off in one of my good professor's lectures, but this is going too far. I have to listen to nimrods in when I'm out just about anywhere; now some guy thinks that I would love to ditch my display for something that runs off the cell phone I refuse to buy. Beam me up Scotty; I really want to use your industrial, starfleet issue, bolted to the wall vid displays.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
If it eventually only costed $40 USD for a pair of these, it would come to the point that everyone would wear a set 99.9% of the time. By time they reached $40, a wireless solution for them would be produced very cheaply so that it could trasmit and use extremely high quality inputs. You and your friends would just walk over to an information input, sync yourself with the signal, and then view the source on your own set of... well... eyes, or whatever, heh. By time they reached $40 for a pair, they would also be able to transmit video from your environment right to the displays. Is it your greatest desire to have visual selection similar to the Predator? Well, now you have it. Want to view IR in the middle of the night? You got it.
Now, just invite your friends over, take a minute to download the DVD of the latest action packed or thriller movie to your A/V control center from the internet and broadcast the signal to all your friends. Oh man, I'm starting to drool here.
Its quite a reasonable inference actually. The reason that Moore's law holds is that smaller and smaller diameter fabrication processes are developed, so that an integrated circuit can be made smaller, and thus also cheaper, and furthermore reduce power consumption, heat production, and speed. Now, the MEMS projection chip does not have to be any particular size, so as process technology becomes more advanced, the cost to produce these will go down with everything else. But a conventional LCD, in order to be useful, has to be a certain size, and, for any given resolution, has to have a certain number of pixels. Of course, technology advances do help LCD's, but its no use to the user if 10 years from now you can get a 5mm desktop LCD display for $10 with the same resolution as the 15" display you want now.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
With the projection capabilities of these, they might be useful in many ways. Two parallel lines of these, offset and calibrated, could make a good "in the air" screen. Add multiple rows and you could get a really nice holographic type of display.
I'm looking forward to following this technology, hot stuff!
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
you certainly can polarize the light coming from a TV (in general, any CRT in fact). the problem is synchronizing polarization changes with the picture being displayed. www.stereographics.com.
The Sony Glasstron uses two minature LCDs in goggles. The Microvision devices actually shoot beams of light into your RETINA and the image/video/whatever is basically "implanted" into your sight. You can literally set up a billion by billion pixel screen the size of a football field right into your eye. You can see colors you've never seen in such vibrance. You should really read the article before you guess. The military uses these deivices to directly overlay map and military data directly into the soldiers right eye (You can also make it transparent so it doesn't blank you out from the world) and they can see realtime map overlays of themselves, where they are walking, what the wind speed it, where enemy checkpoints are, and also comlete night vision, and heat vision overlays DIRECTLY INTO THEIR RETINAS. This is the definition of COOL.
In addition, MEMS isn't limited to just projecting and capturing optical images. That same MEMS chip can be used as an extremely-fast processor.
And it's not even vaporware. These things are already being made and bought and used. It's just a matter of waiting for the price to drop to a level where consumers can afford the technology.