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Video Projector on a Chip?
Stile 65 writes "Cornell researchers have made a 0.2mm-squared mirror mounted on carbon fibers that can oscillate at 2.5KHz, 'caus[ing] a laser beam to scan across a range of up to 180 degrees.' These can be mounted on a chip, and in combination with lasers, arrays of such mirrors on a chip can be made into a video projector. From the article: ''"It would be an incredibly cheap display," [Cornell grad student Shahyaan] Desai said. And the entire device would be small enough to build into a cell phone to project an image on a wall."' This display is made possible because of the innovative use of carbon fiber instead of silicon in MEMS. Unlike a standard DMD, this type of device would have one mirror per scanline, not one mirror per pixel, allowing the chip to be much smaller."
I've been twiddling my thumbs waiting for these, from this article to come out in colour. I thought that was supposed to be RSN or ADN.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Finally, the resolution of a cellphone VDU on a screen the size of a bedsheet! Amazing!
How powerful of a laser would you need to get a reasonably bright image with this thing?
Virus that causes porn movies to randomly play through this display on cell phones. Man that would be embarrassing in a public place like a mall or something. Which is exactly why someone is going to make it.
The largest silicon chips approach a billion devices at a cost of $0.0001 cent per device. What is the manufacturing efficiency of carbon fibre?
What does this have? Phosphors hold their brightness a little bit, down a reducing curve. This sort of display would have the scan line refresh issue of CRTs without the benefit of the fade curve, the light disappears immediately, so then it's just retina response time. I would expect that this would have to have a pretty high refresh rate to not be annoying. Will this allow three-chip operation? Consumer DLPs have a "rainbow effect" because only one chip flashes out the red, green and blue parts of the image. This doesn't bother everyone but I suspect that this system will have similar laments.
No, its not such a new and great idea. Schneider was building a project "laser tv" 15 years ago.
and
No, they are missing one thing: Brighness still does need power. While lasers have become more efficient, and the lifetime of blue ones doesnt suck anymore (thanks to lots of $$ invested by storage companies), there is still physics to play with:
with a perfect display screen, you need at least 15W (rough estimate, dont care to converte the lumens right now) of photon power per m^2 to get a usable picture.
That of course would mean you would need those 15W in Laser emitters. As tubes are prohibitively expensive, that means diods. Diods are a _bit_ heat sensitive (they die like flies if anything is not to their liking), and i havent seen 5W or higher diods without a good cooling solution (because they will still protuce 2 times as much heat as light, and that in a very small volume.
Not to mention the little fact that a single 1W blue laser diode right now would be more expensive than a HD-Dlp beamer (plus it would degrade quickly to unusability).
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
"It would be an incredibly cheap display," [Cornell grad student Shahyaan] Desai said. And the entire device would be small enough to build into a cell phone to project an image on a wall." This is just what we need. There's already people on the subway that use the speaker on their phone to subject everyone to their poor taste in music. Now we'll have people subjecting everyone to their poor taste in television as well.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Thats great for video, but what about audio? When is someone going to make a loudspeaker that doesn't have to be 8 inches across with a kilo of magnet to get anywhere near a full range sound? I mean, we have been using paper cone speakers for over 100 years, and they are still the first choise for most systems!
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*phone rings*
*display activates*
Princess Leia: Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
Commercialize your research or shut the hell up.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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so, in 5 years will princess leia send me a video message?
give a power point presentation to the other people on the bus!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Since it uses one fibre per scane line the oscillation rate is the same as the refresh rate.
How many lumens could a cell phone generate? Projecting on the palm of your hand, sure. Projecting on a wall from say, 6 feet? That's a lot of light energy, my friend. At best, It would have to be a very very dark room.
Yes you need a lot of power, but you do not need all that power in a single coherent beam.
Since the image has a fibre per scanline you can use lots of low power laser diodes.
Otherwise this new technology will be responsible for the downfall of civilization. At least it will provide them with another dead horse to beat when theater revenues drop even lower.
"Help me Kemo_by_the_kilo, you're my only hope......I am the princess of an aquabarian abbassador who was killed in..."
or
"Help me Kemo_by_the_kilo, you're my only hope is what your woman will say with your new prehensile penis!"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You still need a light source -- in this case, lasers. Yes, I know you can get red lasers dirt cheap, but any thing else is very expensive. A laser light source operates at a defined wavelength, and although you cannot easily generate the full spectrum of colors from a single laser. You can get a red, green, and blue laser to potentially mix to generate the full visible spectrum, but the green and especially the blue lasers are very expensive. Also, size does matter -- it is difficult to pack bright light power sources into a small space, like say a cell phone. The techology leap forward here is great in principle, but the phrase "Video projector on a chip" is incorrect, since only the mirrors are on the chip, not the light source.
I'd like to see if a regular, broadcast TV could be designed to use one of these and project on my wall, and how well it would rival current home theater setup.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
It's funny Bose was brought up. I agree they are bad sounding speakers. They have systems with 4 small satelites and a subwoofer (which is quite a common setup), the sub still has to have a reasonable size of paper cone woofer in it, and they are usualy tuned and ported to provide nothing but a rumble box unless the box is of some size.
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See the white papers here:/ glvmainframeset.html
http://www.siliconlight.com/htmlpgs/glvtechframes
I know, this is more like the TI DPL, but the DPL is an array device, and this and the Silicon Light projectors are one device per line. The potential manufacturing difference between arrays and line scanners are huge.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
"I am generally impressed. Their claim that this would be very cheap is credible. However, what kind of cell phone is going to have the power to do video projection?"
Photosynthesis in reverse, combined with those new fuel cells coming out.
I was thinking about a project like this when I was a wee little kid. Back then I though that you could send the scan thru an oscillating crystal, but it never would have worked out. Oh and the fact that a blue laser (or full color?) was in the 10's of thousands of dollars.
:)
But more importantly was how to solve the Vertical scan issue?
Simple, A hexagonal mirrored surface (add more surfaces, get a higher refresh rate).
This way you only need the one horizontal high-speed scan, and a 'relatively' slow Vertical scan.
Apply it to movie theaters... up the wattage of the lasers used and the number of surfaces on the vertical drum. Take that IMAX!
Well, I'm sure it will never happen. but when I was 16, boy could I dream
Really? How do they do that?
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
IN TFA it said the heat was 2x the light out put, so great thats all we need, Red Hot projector up against the dell battery, all i have to say to that is:
Liar Liar, Pants on Fire.
...would use a light source requiring enough power to quickly discharge any cell phone battery and hot enough to instantly give the bearer of the cell phone third degree burns. Dream on.
The Virtual Boy had a single column of LEDs and a vibrating mirror for each eye.
It looks like they've replaced LEDs with lasers and more of them.
I'm still waiting for cheap small (2" max in width/height) high resolution (640x480 min) LCD displays so we can finally hook up head mounted 3D displays to our next gen game consoles that have dual video out so you can hook one console up to two TVs for dual player action/wide screen action or to one pair of 3D glasses so we can view our 3D games in 3D.
Work Safe Porn
Unlike a standard DMD, this type of device would have one mirror per scanline, not one mirror per pixel, allowing the chip to be much smaller.
Wouldn't doing things by scanlines mean lower resolution overall without massive scanning capability to split lines into individual pixels? If not that, then would the power consumption made by such a theoretically small device not be great anyways in order to process this kind of information?
I only ask because I am curious, and I don't understand much about the theory behind this technology.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That's nothing. Let's see snakes on a chip...
Could this have other possible applications in optical routers and optical computers. I've read an article where mirrors were mounted on silicon wafers with nano-scale actuators for use in optical routers. I'm wondering if this technology has potential applications in fiber-optic networks.
This sounds similar to the Microvision PicoProjector. http://microvision.com/proj.html
Couldn't this be used to make smaller and faster CD writers? What if they can use it to write parallel bits to a disc
Two words, flash porn. Like a flash mob, but you show up to watch some porn.
Today, Jenna Does Everybody, at the mall food court, 2pm. Be there.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
Microvision http://microvision.com/ has been working to bring MEMs projectors to market for several years for personal and heads up display uses. They have had a single color wearable display on the market for years using this technology for specialized display purposes (military and maintance technicians). Disclosure: I do own stock in microvision, so take the above with a large grain of salt....
...this is not anything new. Microvision has been working on a similar technology for some time now:
http://www.microvision.com/proj.html
Can't say whether it'll come out of the R&D phase or not, but the "mini-projector in a cell phone" is not groundbreaking.
Patents expire in 17 or 20 years depending on when they were filed and when the patent rules changed, but either way they're gone.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks