A Projection Display For Your Pocket

lub writes "The German Fraunhofer-Instituts für Siliziumtechnologie is developing a pocket beamer. It uses a laser beam and a rotating mirror to display the image. Another laser and a photo diode is used to verify whether the displayed image is shown correctly, so the electronics can adjust the image when the beamer moves. No colors yet; 320x240 in nice shades of red is what they have now, but higher resolutions and color might be implemented later. I want this in my BlackBerry!"

Comments

photoshop

[Hatta]

That picture is obviously a photoshop job. Anyone got a real picture?

Revolutionary.

[eric434]

If they can manufacture this cheap, then it will revolutionize laser lightshows. Effectively, this is a closed-loop scanning galvanometer capable of 30K+ speeds -- and current scanners with similar capabilities cost thousands of dollars per axis. They're a lot bigger too.

If you replace the dinky red diode with a few hundred milliwatts of green, then guess what? Laser show in your pocket, at a price that any would-be laserist can afford. Not to mention all the applications in laser marking: the flexure arrangement means that the Fraunhofer galvo can achieve much longer lifetimes than standard ball-bearing arrangments. When you're scanning thousands of times per second, 24 hours a day... that's a good thing.

Re:Revolutionary.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is probably not as accurately and arbitrarily positionable as you would like it to be for a laser show. The article mentions a second guide laser and sensors which read the current orientation of the mirror. The display laser is then modulated according to the position, so they're probably causing a regular motion pattern onto which the image the image is mapped instead of telling the mirror to orientate towards a sequence of exact pixel positions.

Already obsoleted

[erikharrison]

I mean, maybe it's signifigantly larger, but I want one of these: http://www.io2technology.com/dojo/178/v.jsp

The difference being partially that the heliodisplay works, now, and is much more Star War-sy

Cinematic precursor

[ScrewMaster]

Does anyone remember that Sean Connery movie "Zardoz", where he is poking around someone's house and finds a green emerald ring, which when he activates it begins speaking and projects a computer display on the wall in front of him. I thought that was pretty cool.

Re:Sprachen ze WHAT?

[cbelt3]

Sounds a lot like a commerical application for 1980's technology called "Adaptive Optics", primarily developed for applications in the Strategic Defense Initiative. Despite the marketing-speak (ok, Kaufmann-sprache), the attraction here should be a commercial application of adaptive-optics-on-Silicon. The display is not intended to be a 'holoprojector', but a more compact projector.

Combining the AO-Si micromirror assemblies with multi-color lasers Red, Green and Blue lasers (RGB for you guys paying attention) would make for a nice compact projector. Obviously from reading the article, it's all conceptual. Don't plan on having one for at least 1-3 years.

Picture? Yes! Noise? Oh-no!

[martyb]

Nach jeder Auslenkung ziehen die Federn den Spiegel so schnell in seine Ausgangslage zurück, dass er sich mehrere tausend Mal pro Sekunde verkippen lässt.

It's been many years since I studied German, but that reads to me: the mirror moves "more than a thousand times per second". Translation: this thing vibrates at approximately 1 KHz. That's probably not only audible, but it probably would cause a noticable vibration in your hand, too.

I realize the vibration's amplitude is probably minor, but I can hear the buzz from a TV from 30 feet away... and I've known several other people who could do the same, so I'm not unique in that regard. The whir of my PC's fan and disk drives can be terribly annoying.

So, I think it's a great accomplishment, but I'd hold off buying one until the buzz dies down. ;^)