Slashdot Mirror
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!"
Finally a Nintendo Virtual Boy that I can share and experience with my friends!
Is that a beamer in your pocket......
oh yeah and firsties.
Loosely translated in English (I don't soeak German, but my dog does).
Beamer for the vest pocket
A projector in the pocket size is in range: In it a mobile micro mirror develops the picture line for line. In laboratory prototypes researchers could increase its frequency of oscillation and dissolution so far that diagrams and texts appear clearly readable.
Not much more largely than a piece wuerfelzucker could be the Beamer of the future. Built into Handys would always participate the mini projector - approximately for a PowerPoint presentation in the small circle or the fast view into an on-line journal. In strange cities it could facilitate orientation, by projecting simply a city plan to the next house wall. Still is this future music. Researchers of the institute for Fraunhofer for silicon technology ISIT in Itzehoe however already built a demonstrator for such a tiny equipment. It projects texts and diagrams with a dissolution of 320 x 240 pixels. Heart is a mobile mirror with a diameter of 1,5 millimeters, which can be manufactured as mass product on a chip. It directs a laser beam by speedy changing of its tilting angle, and develops so the picture pixel for pixels.
"the special at the mirror is its suspension", stresses Ulrich Hofmann. "by a special attachment at two torsion bars the mirror can be tilted around two axles. Thus it can divert a laser beam horizontal and vertically." After each deflection the feathers/springs withdraw the mirror so fast into its initial position that it can be tilted several thousands times per second. Suitably the high mobility the researchers accelerated electronics. It decides within the range of nanoseconds, how it must modulate the laser light, so that each pixel in the correct brightness appears. In order to avoid errors in the projection, a second laser serves as control. It radiates likewise on the mobile mirror; the reflected light meets however a photodiode, which locates, as the mirror tilted. "the mirror changes its position for example by vibrations inadvertently, notices control this", explains Hofmann. "electronics can react then flexibly to it and adapt the picture information accordingly." The system is thereby to a large extent insensitively in relation to disturbances from the outside.
Still the demonstrator fits into no mobile telephone. "for the test we had not made, say electronics smaller yet to a minimum" Hofmann. That is however one of the next goals of the researchers, who in addition the frequency of the mirror movement and so the dissolution would like to increase. Also in other place it hooks still: As tiny source of light with sufficient life span and leuchtstaerke there are so far only red laser diodes. Within this range the researchers wait now for developments of their colleagues. They however already prepared their system for the multi-color enterprise.
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
That picture is obviously a photoshop job. Anyone got a real picture?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
God I even previewed it... should previewed the preview. :)
Anyone else wondering how they got black on the white sheet of paper with a red laser in the image of this device in TFA?
Is that a pocket beamer in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Anything would be better than watching the stupid slideshow before movies. All the boring awful ads and quote from Cher and Queen Latifah....
I was thinking, hey, bring in my own little projector.
Jesus, am I talking right now?
This device should be surpressed for the good of all humanity. Think of the children!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Who's going to want to watch a display in my pocket?
http://mirrordot.org/stories/eb57b2ee6820e0666d616 ccb92825fc0/index.html
Colour projection is obviously going to rely on having either 3 base colour lasers (red, green, blue) or having a full-spectrum white.
In the world of lasers, Red is the cheapest right now with Green a close second.
However, when you get to Blue lasers, the price is significantly higher and then White lasers require you to sell your granny to afford them.
I'd like to be wrong but a system like this will probably stay monochrome for a while yet.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
At technology review they have an article about a similar device.m o1204.asp?p=1
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/12/de
Here is the story (in german) and here is the image only (obvious mockup)
Move Sig. For great justice.
Or how about a translation serice that doesnt rely on the currently /.'ed server:
Google's translation of the MirrorDot mirror
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.
This
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
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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Lots and lots of red.
[sniffsniff] "What's that I smell burning?"
It's a monochrome laser projector with a scanning mirror. There is one of these in every laser printer. Except this one scans two dimensions. Then again, its 320x200 instead of 5100 pixel line scanned by a 600dpi letter-size printer. So its not a big deal. Besides, wasn't there, back in 1998 or so, some 3D stereo display for some game console that used a red scanning laser? I think I've seen one in K-mart. I suppose, noone wanted a monochrome display then, and noone will want one now.
So the interesting thing about this gadget is not the amazing fact that someone made a laser projector, because there really is nothing amazing about it. The interesting thing is whether these guys would ever get 3 lasers (especially the blue one) cheap enough, while powerfull enough to scan a highres picture, as large as an LCD projector does, onto a wall. They'd need 3 powerfull lasers. As light sources go, lasers are about the least efficient, so the gizmo would drain a lot of power, and it will have to be large, with the heatsinks, fans, an all. So, the gadget would really end up being at least as large as an LCD projector, and some 10 times more expensive, mostly because of the blue laser. Why bother?
Is this really new technology? The Canesta keyboard already projects an image of a keyboard on any surface. This seems to be the same thing, except the Canesta keyboard exists in reality, and this site has a (well looks like anyway) photoshoped image. It could of course differ in resolution, etc.
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. ;^)