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."

Comments

No^2

[imsabbel]

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).

2.5 KHz is a pretty high refresh rate

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it uses one fibre per scane line the oscillation rate is the same as the refresh rate.

Hello Virtual Boy

[KalvinB]

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.