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Matchbox Sized Color Projectors?
Justin Nolan sent in a very brief link about
ultra small projectors which says
"Upstream Engineering is willing to provide miniature color video projectors for use with portable video player, travel TV, laptops and handhelds next year. Upstream's patented technology, called Photon Vacuum, maximizes the amount of photons sent to the target from the light source in a minimum space and allows the creation of devices free of a variety of components currently used in projectors that unnecessarily waste energy. Photon Vacuum enables the smallest projector designs in the world, ultimately to a size of matchbox. The company says is going to push the power consumption of the whole device ultimately to below 4 watts while still gaining a travel-TV sized color projection" You can also read Upstream's website for almost as little information.
Are they going to be 2k US+ like conventional projectors? Will they force the price of conventional projectors down?
Does this mean that projectors will get smaller, cheaper and more high quality?
The holy grail!
Chris
Site says it's down for "software upgrade".
Anyone got a mirror?
Now, if lots of these min-projectors could be put together in a matrix, will this mean that, finally, big screen TVs can be produced more cheaply. (If one mini-projector does dead, just swap it out).
Thats the spirit. Every electric and electronic appliance should go for that goal. While the effort to finally get a cheap, clean and reliable source of energy is good, we must for once pay attention to nature and reduce power consuption to a minimum, that would buy us some time or being able to rely in smaller sources of energy like wind or solar pannels. Size does matter!!,
Although I dont know what im going to do whith such a tiny proyector, maybe i'll put it in my back pockent and sit on it afterwards and break it. Or have it stuck in a child's ear.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
Shows how much Slashdot checks a post before it hits the front page ...
Obviously this would hinge on cost, but I seems to me that this would make it much more practical to integrate projected images through a living or work space. A lot of futuristic concepts include projectors in their design, but these units are always large and ugly. Having projectors conveniently displaying information and entertainment (TV, artwork, notifications, etc.) on surfaces throughout the house would be "really neat"
SPAM
There's nothing on that site to indicate that they're anything other than vapourware.
It doesn't follow that it's impossible - on the contrary, I think this is a technology we'll be seeing very soon - I just doubt that it will be from this company.
So why do I think we'll be seeing it soon ? Simple, grasshopper. Lasers. It's easy enough to build a poor quality monochrome vector display out of a laser diode and a couple of mirrors on motors. That's expensive and clunky.
A laser diode and a couple of piezo-transducer-mounted mirrors would be a slightly more elegant mechanism, and if you can build a vector display with this, you ought just as easily to be able to build a raster display.
So all we're missing is the cheap green laser diode and the cheap blue laser diode to complement the existing cheap red laser diode.
Now, you CAN buy a green laser pointer that's only moderately painfully expensive - and now that there's an imminent demand for blue laser diodes for high density DVD players I'm hoping their cost will plummet.
I don't have the skills to build this, but I'm hoping someone will get onto it soon.
D.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
oh boy. now when your rfid chip is read, the ads on the walls can change to entice you as you walk by only to change for the next person's "sale match" item.
yes, this will be a great tool for on-the-go presenters, but damn, i can hear the smiles on the marketing dept's collective face.
A brief google of "photon vacuum" comes up with a series of papers in the realm of quantum physics http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0954-3899/29/1/311.
I need to finish reading what papers I can find regarding this concept, but so far it looks like something still in the arena of pure science. One article also refers to carbon nano tubes, so if this isn't vapor ware it will be expensive.
was about discovery and making great things. But apparently it's about patenting the best ideas.
Why can't science be for the good of all not just for the ruling class? I hate it when people come up with good ideas then think they have to patent them.
What would we be allowed to know about physics if Einstein patented his ideas? We'd have to pay to use E=mc^2.
Science is about profit not discovering great things and sharing them with the world.
I was thinking the same thing. The biggest tip-off is the talk about maximizing the amount of photons. Really, that's just techno-jargon saying that they want the screen to be bright. Any time you have to resort to techno-babble to explain simple things, it means that you probably can't even do the simple things, much less the difficult things.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
In the Boorman film ZARDOZ (1974), the futuristic denizens of that film use mini-projectors like these in their rings for interfaces. You can also see Charlotte Rampling and Sean connery in various states of undress.
-- Real Stupidity is the Artificial Intelligence of the 21st century
Siemens already have this technology, working as a prototype... from 2001!? Upstream is a laggard!
/ ar tikel03/
http://w4.siemens.de/FuI/en/archiv/pof/heft1_02
The miniature format is also of great interest in the field of projection technology. Siemens has developed a matchbox-sized daylight projector that can be plugged into a cell phone with a corresponding interface. The projector can be used for presentations in small meetings or for surfing the Internet. This projection cell phone was recently presented at the CeBIT 2002 computer show in Hannover, Germany. An LED array in the module lights up a microdisplay through a beam splitter. The light is modulated with the image information by the display, then exits through the projection lenses. Full-color pictures can be generated by rapidly illuminating the monochrome display with the red, blue and green LED colors in sequence. "This mini-projector can project onto any surface--even a piece of paper or the back of an airplane seat," says Marco Werner from Siemens Information and Communication Mobile. The projector currently generates 1.1 lm, enough to illuminate a postcard-sized surface. "But the prototype still offers enormous room for improvement," says Werner enthusiastically. With optimized design and equipped with more intense light-emitting diodes, it should be possible to improve the luminous efficiency by a factor of ten over the next two years.
Of course, lasers have also been considered as a light source. Their use would make it possible to eliminate the focusing optics and to project onto curved surfaces. However, suitable miniature laser diodes are currently available only in red. The efficiency level of the blue and green solid-state lasers now on the market is still too low. In the distant future, Werner can also imagine 3D laser projectors that have no need of fixed projection screens. In such a situation, the image would then be created on a boundary surface like a patch of air whose density has been altered using ultrasound.