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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?
Site says it's down for "software upgrade".
Anyone got a mirror?
They made the projectors to fit inside of a Matchbox car!!!
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."
Sounds like these guys will be up for the 2004 Wired Vaporware awards.
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
I am sure something useful will come, eventually, but don't hold your breath waiting for anything cool to buy any time soon.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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
Little info and terms like "Photon Vacuum" make this thing sound like the next high end graphics card from the bitboys... If they had a usable product they would give you at least some information - especially since the design is according to them patent protected...
The projector:
l
http://www.upstream.fi/index.html
The Technology
http://www.upstream.fi/technology.htm
Upstream's unique and revolutionary technology, called Photon Vacuum, practically maximizes the amount of photons sent to the target from the light source in a minimum space. This is not an easy trick since the etendue law of light in physics requires more space for better efficiency. Our special technology enables us to get rid of a variety of components currently used in projectors that unnecessarily waste energy. The current table projectors extract typically only a few watts of light power out of 200W of input power.
Photon Vacuum enables the smallest projector designs in the world, ultimately to a size of matchbox. It is possible to push the power consumption of the whole device ultimately to below 4 watts while still gaining a travel-TV sized color projection. There are a myriad of possible applications for this technology.
First in the world, Upstream Engineering introduces a revolutionary optical technology that will enable video projection from matchbox-sized device running on batteries.
Our expertise covers all the necessary areas from micro-optics to low-power digital electronics. We design custom projectors based on our unique technology.
For people who are often going to meetings, this makes it pretty quick to set up, could go off your laptops power source so no need looking for an outlet, no need to adjust it, nice and fast. If it is priced correctly, I would even buy it just to have since, you never know when a gadget like this will come in handy. Ok okay, yes I was the one to buy the USB laptop lamp, and no I don't use it :(
Pretty soon, when you fly on an airplane, every time someone leans back their seat you'll hear the person behind them whine "hey! you're keystoning my screen, man!"
Put one of these in a cameraphone. You'll soon have people giving slideshows of the pictures they took on vacation straight from the phone. oy.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Their website doesn't even feature a single photo, prototype, or past products. I'm surprised this article was even approved. It certainly looks like yet another one of those companies which try to persuade people to buy shares, counting on a 'revolutionary' product which the company is unlikely to ever succeed in producing.
Are they sure they didn't mean photon vapor? I hear they are working on fusion as well...
(this is offended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
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.
take it on a plane that still uses 'large screen at the front' and show your own movies
following a bus at night- project it on the rear of the bus, drive safely and watch a movie/tv (dear, your are getting to close to the screen)
put one on the rear of your motorcycle- pointed at your jacket, for various phrases to roll through-- should realy confuse someone somewhere..
inverted peeping tom- sneak around vidding porn into peoples houses-think what happened when laser pointers first came out- then multiply X the number of porn movies ever made
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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.
Optics.org had an article
this summer about a pair of other pocket projector projects. These includes using an array of lasers to limit scanning or a single higher powered light-source. If 'pocket' is the only thing that matters you might also look into a development of normal bar-code scanners.
Someone jumped the gun here.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Do you actually believe that you can project a reasonable image with _4 watts_ of power? You need energy to create photons. Even with zero heat loss, you can't get a luminous image out of 4 watts. This is vaporware at best.
They talk about a "photon vacuum" but all is see is an information vacuum and a product vacuum. There is no there there.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
"The size of the projection will be initially around the size of standard travel televisions."
Does anyone have a figure for the amount of light needed per square foot for good visibility on a screen with normal meeting room lighting? Assume solid state light source efficiency levels.
There are two interesting parts to their claims. One is reduction in size, the other is reduction in power requirements. The statement above from their website leads me to believe they're really just reducing the size of the device - the 4W figure is spread over just a few square inches. When they need to cover several square feet the power consumption will increase proportionally, and so will the size of the device to allow for adequate cooling.
Upstream Engineering is willing to provide miniature color video projectors...
Willing to provide???
Infinium is willing to provide Hard OCP a lawsuit. Television networks are willing to provide good entertainment. The government is willing to provide conclusive evidence of foreign WMD programs.
A lot of people are willing to provide things -doesnt mean that it will happen.
I think someone should be willing to provide Upstream an alternative to Babelfish.
Don't forget that while the projector won't be 100% efficient, neither is a light bulb.
Upstream Engineering is willing to provide miniature color video projectors for use with portable video player, travel TV, laptops and handhelds next year.
Yeah, most companies would keep this kind of tech to themselves, to impress their friends!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
get smaller, cheaper and more high quality?
Pick 2. you can't have all three.
You can have just about anything you want for any price you want--you just have to be willing to wait until somebody comes up with it.
Sure you can. Just not right now.
You think computers were destined to be the size of houses?
Spam removed for the Internet's pleasure
They could be doing laser scanning, but I doubt it. I bet they're using LEDs as the light source. Possibly micro arrays for the actual image, but most likely still sticking with a small LED array that has the three colors, a special lensing system that focuses them through a monochrome LCD (cheap non-high temperature transmissive) and then another lens which then produces the output.
This would provide several advantages. First, it would be fairly efficient since 4W of LED power is still fairly efficient (though still 'hot' and not close at all to the ideal 100%). The cheap LCD display due to the lower heat. Small size, especially if high index refrective lenses are used.
Disadvantages are many. Traditional projectors use a bulb which, for all intents and purposes can be modelled as a point light source. Optics are easy, comparatively. For a LED array the optics would be...non trivial. I suppose they could be using single LEDs but even then the leds are seperated, which still makes the job difficult. Another is that the smaller the package, the smaller the optics. The smaller the optics the worse the image. There's a reason you'll never get 4 meter telescope pictures out of a 10cm telescope. The resolving power of the lenses is limited by their size. The LED element will be huge compared to the lens size, and the picture is simply going to be poor.
It'll happen, through this speculative idea or through another, but real multimedia projectors for a given size projection have to be at least as large as the lens has to be for the quality you want. The only thing they might be able to make gains on without ruining the quality are lamp efficiency, lower heat output (these are coupled), and the design of the lens systems currently needed to throw a decent image across a room.
-Adam
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
The local newspaper Kaleva here in Oulu Finland ran a story about them and their prototype:
Kaleva's story
Bigger picture
The caption of the picture says: Prototype and a matchbox. World's smallest videoprojector consists of a lightning machine, which captures light more efficiently. There is also text about the future screen resolutions and the cost of the thing, 700? at first and later 250?.
jari / dj ken-guru