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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."
If monitors are every replaced with a slot in your cell-phone or funky geek ware glasses, what are we support to hit when something doesn't work.
Besides how many more deaths might this cause then cell-phones, driving down the road typing up a document in one eye and driving with the other.
Medevo
http://www.reviewfinder.com/reviews/glasstron/inde x.asp
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
This technology sounds better than HDTV. It would be funny if moore's law put this in front of consumers before HDTV could become dominant. Beams an animorphic DVD right to my eyes. cool.
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somebody help me stop drooling! i'm gonna become dehydrated at this rate!
Some better descriptions of how MEMS display work here and here (flash based, but very good)
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'.
If you go take a look at Microvision's website, you'll see that MEMS can be used in everything and are the best thing ever.
Or so they tell you
More than likely they're just trying to get gobs of money from investors... maybe what Cringely's saying is true, but I can't share his enthusiasm
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
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
Wow, so like 2850 or so? That's a LONG time ;-)
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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.
I'm waiting for TFTs or their replacement to be cheap enough to replace my desk surface. It will be nice to go back to just writing on to sheets of paper, even if the sheets are virtual and my writing is captured by some kind of Graphiti translator. Ah yes, three by four foot window maker sessions would be nice.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Turn on, JACK IN, drop out!"
-- ghost of Timothy Leary
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
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I usually have a bit of reservation for retinal display... If we forget to set the screensaver, the electron beam may burn a few pixels on the monitor... If the MEMS control unit got stuck, guess which part of your eyes will get burned...
For MEMS based projection monitor, it is conceptually similar to an old fashion CRT. Both scan the {laser,electron} beam line-by-line to create image. The 8lb of lead required for CRT is to protect us again the electron beam. The scanning circuit itself is not that bulky.
If we can project colored TV image with laser safely and economically today, we do not really need to have MEMS yet. The problem is whether it is technically feasible. In my country, the allowable power for laser pointer is 1mW. Assume the max intensity of any pixel of the "laser TV" is 0.01 mW, a 800x600 resolution require a 4.8W laser. It is a pretty scary stuff...
- I can see this kind of technology making laptops smaller; without needing an LCD display, all one has to do is have a keyboard (which can fold up) and a jack for hooking up the glasses with the MEMS display to.
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Enhanced "security". Useful for such high-security applications such as looking at your p0rn in the same room as your wife without her knowing.
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3) Blakes 7 predicted this technology back in 1978 (do a search for "walkman" on that page). Can anyone cite an earlier prediction for this kind of technology in science fiction literature.
- SamThe secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
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
How come nobody has stated the obvious yet ?
It's perfect for pr0n!
Now your boss will have to look at your facial expression to see if you're working or not; good poker players need never work again!
graspee
The article was more about using these devices to display onto a transparent screen of whatever size you want. That is, they're not talking as much about directly sending this information to your eyes (on a cell phone), but instead making a box that looks just like a television, but has greater resolution, is non-toxic to make, and (supposedly) very cheap and light.
However, there's something seriously lacking in this article. They claim the current civilian devices cost upwards of $10,000 dollars. But they also claim that the price will drop to $40 dollars. That sounds wonderful. But I don't see something losing 99.6% of its production cost in a short amount of time. Certainly not if this company is seeking to maintain its profits.
My short summary: sounds interesting, not very probable until there are some economical changes to the devices.
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!
Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. Yes, the technology exists, but it will be twenty years (if ever) that it gets affordably into the hands of consumers. Remember, we were all supposed to be living on the moon or piloting a flying car to work or using jet packs by now. Actually, all that was supposed to happen by the 1980's.
There's a lot of good stuff out there that's permanently in prototype.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
In order to display your DVD on their wireless headsets, it would have to be broadcast to them and broadcasting a DVD would be restricted by copyright
Wrong. In copyright law (Title 17, United States Code), "broadcasting" a movie is called "performance." Performance is not an exclusive right of a copyright holder; you're thinking of public performance and display (17 USC 106). Performance within a household would almost certainly count as fair use (17 USC 107).
EULAs presented after the sale aren't likely to be all that enforceable against an individual citizen acting in a private home viewing environment.
Will I retire or break 10K?
...Like the typewriter described in the article. The TV will still be a big box looking like a TV, but the MEMS thingy will be projecting the image onto the screen... so, it will look like a TV, work like a TV, but the insides will be pretty much empty apart from the MEMS and some tuning electrics.
Some simple arrithmatic:
:)
First, lets assume that this kind of tech would only be interesting for me at a pricepoint of some $300 (maybe that'll change when I get filthy rich, but let's not count our Aibo's before they're hacked).
This takes 5 iterations to get to (assuming Moore's law holds for the price as well as the capabilities):
$10.000->$5.000->$2.500->$1.250->$612. 5->$306.
Five generations means 5x18=90 months
That's 7 years before this tech comes to the marketplace at an affordable price (iow capable of achieving market penentration).
Seems like OLEDS, Smartpaper or E-ink will have won by then
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
LCDs, which, for all their flatness, will always be dimmer, too.
Dimmer? I have a 17" LCD in front of me, and I still would have bought it even if it was bigger than my old CRT. It's actually brighter, because I can crank the brightness all the way up, and black pixels are still pitch black. The digital interface is razer sharp, and the image quality is amazing.
I don't know what he's been looking at, but my LCD is the brightest display I've ever used, or at least it seems that way.
-twb
Sony is pursuing this approach and I believe there were a few other MEMS-based articles posted on Slashdot in recent years.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I want something that I can watch in complete privacy of turn around and aim at a wall covered with "active paint" to amplify the emitted signal and watch with some friends.
HD TV's a crock anyway. It'll never happen. Too much money is already being made off the existing infrastructure and the content doesn't merit any increase in quality. Its all just filler between the ads anyway.
The reruns won't get any better just because you increase the resolution on your set. They were taped with one technology and that where its going to stay.
And reruns are all we're going to get when Valenti finally wins one for the xxAAs.
The death of content.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It's not that you can't build wearable displays. Many have been built. It's that wearing a display isn't fun. Wearable displays get tiring fast. Try one some time.
If you really want one of these things, MicroOptical sells a VGA-compatible eyeglass-mounted display for $2500. And here's an article about Linux on a wearable. This guy writes about using EMACS, "awk", and a wrist-mounted keyboard.
"Now, the MEMS projection chip does not have to be any particular size,..."
Yes it does. Go read up on diffraction.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Everything that you (and Cringely) say will hamper reductions in LCD price could also be applied to CRTs. However, as he points out, CRT prices have dropped a great deal over the last several years. "Moore's law" may not apply in its most formal sense (i.e. the sense that deals with chip fabrication), but it's come to take on a more general meaning that the bang/buck of high tech items tends to improve exponentially over time. And this latter meaning is almost certainly applicable to LCDs.
MEMS is a chip, but not just a normal chip with transisters and crap on it- it has thousands of tiny mirrors, each attached to a tiny motor. These mirrors flicker back and forth to reflect light onto whatever.
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If that's successful, the MPAA will introduce legislation that requires you to pay per eyeball. "We don't want to overcharge one-eyed consumers," says the press release.
I used to play trumpet at school then, so I just took the trumpet and started playing loudly through the window. Whenever he'd step out on the balcony, I'd stop. After three times, he got the hint, and I got my beauty sleep...
They're intrusive. They're annoying, and they're distracting. I feel the same way about land lines, but at least they are isolated to the house. No movie theater or playhouse is going to install a land line in the auditorium, so there's little to worry about on that front. It's a lot more likely that some dumbass fifteen year old is going to bring one into the movie that I'm enjoying (like $15 later) and talk to his homies about the bitch he's feeling up in front of me. I, personally, don't want to see that unless it's part of the film.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Well at least in the US a lot of the problem with cell phones is people who have them and don't know how to turn them off.
Also, its kind of nice to know that while you're out doing whatever, your boss/significant other/parent/annoying friend can't get in touch with you. With a cell phone, the common behavior is to brinig it with you all the time and have it on as much as possible.
Need a Catering Connection
The GameBoy REALLYAdvance(d)
;) )
.95959% will cause failure of display. Tests involving $.20 addition to GBRA proved that added complexity of thing called 'light button' too much for GBRA users." - Crazy Japanese guy claiming to be from Nintendo
;)
1mb of RAM (whoohoo!
200MB ROM carts the size of salt grains "Now even easier to lose!" - Nintendo
and a virtual 20ft screen projected directly into your head.....but no backlight
"You must aim eyes directly at sun or flash of nuclear explosion at a precise angle. Deviation of
And in other news, Nintendo has acquired the rights to the song "Staring At The Sun" by U2 for use in a future ad campaign.
Please, no one take this seriously, I don't want some rabid Nintendo fanboys after me....the Atari ones were bad enough"
Got friends?
Last time I checked, movie theaters charged you for each one of your "urchins" as well. Not to mention the each ticket usually costs twice the price of a DVD rental. BTW.. In case you didn't notice VCR/DVD rentals didn't exactly kill Hollywood now did they?
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
I cant wait for the day that I can replace them with cheap, lightweight, easily moved *anythings*.
That day has come. (Okay, not cheap, but the rest fits nicely.)
FWIW, those 20" CRT monitors are probably about 18.5" viewable each. Roughly US$1,800 will give you two of these babies, one of which has just graced my desk. It's 19" of pure viewing pleasure, with multidomain technology for accurate color at any viewing angle up to 170 horizontal and vertical, and it tips the scales at a mere 17.5 pounds. 12080x1024 resolution looks really nice on this panel (which isn't surprising seeing as that's its native resolution.)
Don't throw out your existing speakers if you like bass, though. Hence the old but nice Yamaha YST-M20DSPs next to it. The literature actually mentions "powerful 3-watt speakers", which almost brought tears to my eyes from laughing so hard. They sound quite crisp, but are pitifully lacking in bass. (Yes, even when the bass is cranked in the OSD control.)
Having both HD15 and DVI-D connectors was a requirement for my next monitor, and this fits the bill nicely.
The built-in microphone is a nice touch. I don't recall it being mentioned in the lit; I only discovered it when I saw the MIC OUT connector on the back panel. I believe the opening for the mic itself is right between the top of the N and I in the ViewSonic logo on the front panel. It's very discreet.
Enough rambling -- grab a high-quality LCD today and don't look back.
I noticed that .25 refresh... how does quake look on it?
does text hold together as you scroll by it?
BOSTON SUCKS!
Then there'd be no discussion, and the ideas are often worth discussing. If you don't think so, propose a Cringely category (if there isn't one already) and unsubscribe instead of trying to unsubscribe all of us.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Then, of course, there's the obligatory 3D pr0n.
you could try a woman. they're 3D in a deeper way.
Working for necessity's mother.
I'm not one to point out minor mistakes but these ones especially annoyed me:
1) It is micro-electro mechanical systems. Anyone who has ever read a single article about MEMS would know what it really stands for. It is annoying that noone seems to get a 4-letter acronym.
2) MEMS is not a product of the "emerging nanotechnology". It is a product of the long-available microtechnology just like its name suggests. We have a Microtechnology laboratory where 0.5um is out minimum feature size and we routinely build/develop MEMS devices.
Anyone who writes an article about advanced material should study a bit.
---
I think I read a quote somewhere about stupidity
Guess this is another evidence of how people can use high tech to do stupid things.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I don't avoid it. I have a phone and make frequent use of it. But I'd never buy a phone that doesn't vibrate, and I only use the ringer on mine when I'm asleep. I don't care if they ring, I just don't want them to ring during a romantic dinner at a restaurant, at the movies, or other places like that. Surely that isn't out of line with the opinions of others, right?
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
MEMS is good for a lot more than just personal retinal-projected video.
Coming? It's already here. What he's calling by the generic name MEMS, Texas Insturments calls by their trade name DLP (Digital Light Processing). It's all over the place, expecially the digital presentations of "Star Wars, Part 2: Attack of the Clones". Not mentioning the most successful current MEMS technology really costs him some credibility.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
AIUI CRTs work by having the phosphor giving out light even while it's not being bombarded with electrons. LCDs and projectors work by shining light through all the pixels at the same time. This idea is just using the moving-average idea that your retina uses, right?
If this thing is intending to shine a light into my eye to match real-world brightnesses over millions of pixels, isn't it going to need a collimated light source millions of times brighter than real-world light? I'm sure that is possible with a laser but do I want something that is only not blinding me because it's moving fast enough? Anybody seen what happens to a film when it gets stuck? Doesn't take long for the frame to burst into flames.
Yes, I should have mentioned its 25ms refresh rate. Text is pretty much rock-solid, even if I grab the scroll bar in IE and ram it up and down quickly. I haven't really played Quake III on it, but I have played Dark Age of Camelot (Go Hibernia!), and even if I switch mouselook on and flick my mouse around, the scenery flies around without any noticeable difference in smoothness (and lack of smearing) as on the 17" Sony GDM-200PS (very nice CRT monitor) which the VX900 replaced.
:)
So, all in all, a kick-ass monitor.
I have tried out retinal scanners and I say they are not the wave of the future. First off, its like looking through a keyhole, which is fatiguing. Next, its grainy the same way a laser hologram is grainy [so its not just a problem of low resolution]. After using one for only about 5 minutes, I got one of the worst headaches I've ever had. My eyes hurt for hours afterwards, and were photo sensitive. I do not see this technology becoming mainstream for a very long time, but probably relegated to special uses similar to what holography and other 3d tricks are used for today.
Ok, it's supposed to be funy (and it is :-) but it would be the same. They can charge per eyeball atoms-count if they want. You'll look at the final price.
:-) (ok, it could be a mess!)
Anyway (changing subject), maybe they could make an eyeglass version so that we don't need to work all the time at the office. Just imagine a 11:30 am pr0n session with this stuff
unfinished: (adj.)
I was just wondering how this would affect people with not so normal vision... :)
One of the first things I realized after having LASIK done a few years back was the enjoyment of watching TV in bed without worrying about glasses/contacts, etc... (previous vision before LASIK was 20/800... corrected to 20/20).
So if the image is being beamed directly to your retina, it should be able to make corrections for astigmitism/myopia, what have you....
Just something to think about..... from the people at Getty
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Now you'll have to hold your cellphone to your eye and use the keyboard/mouse too! You'll need 3 hands.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Looks to me like Cringley's brain went through a hiccup here:
Nano != Micro with "reprsent" lending additional cheap-shot weight to the conjecture.
Seastead this.
The large theater systems from Christie and Barco and the very largest home and business DLP projectors use three DLPs. Most home and small business DLP projectors use a single DLP chip and a rotating color wheel. Personally, the technology behind DLP, an array of mirrors, is more impressive than a single moving mirror.
Coincidentially, TI's design is the result of their attempts to create exactly the single-mirror type of system described. They gave up on that approach because of what they learned about physical behavior at the nano-level. The mirrors tended to stick on one position or the other. So they turned that from a liability to a virtue. Instead of trying to directly analog modulate the light, they decided to use time modulation.
DLP is no less cool because it actually exists, and is in use in thousands of projectors.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Ugh - why on earth would you want to go back to writing? It's so bloody *slow*. I hate writing. It takes forever, and having to differentiate my written symbols for ( { < and [ enough so that any intelligence (human, artificial or other) can decipher them on their own (without context) would really start to annoy me.
Typing's quicker and more precise.
I suppose at least for an English speaker though. I guess if you speak a language with characters that aren't neccessarily part of 7-bit ascii, things can get a little more complicated...
K.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Until this system can come with a 8+ speaker full surround sound system complete with the seat shaking bass that tends to go with the typical hollywood shootemup blockbuster I'll go with the theater.... headphones can only do so much.
That and there's something quintessentialy different about watching a movie in a crouded theator. One of the classes I took in college centered on the vampire film (it was a very strange class). The professor made a big deal of getting a largish room with a projection screen for the film showings because of the atmospheric difference between watching a film alone and with 120 some odd people.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.