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World's Smallest Projector
SkinnyGuy writes "Mixed into all of PCMag's CES preview coverage is an interesting story about a projector that's no bigger than an iPod. An early version showed up at last year's CES, but some of the guts weren't inside the small body. Now they are. It uses lasers to project the image. Really fascinating, futuristic stuff."
Don't let the, sharks get a hold, of this one...
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
Frickin' lasers! Now all we need is some sharks.
Mixed into all of PCMag's CES preview coverage is an interesting story about a projector that's no bigger than an iPod.
I think the fact that they're missing in all of this, is that porn doesn't care what size it is.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Finally something that is not wasting 90% of it's energy as heat, not to mention replacing ridiculously expensive bulbs every few hundred hours. :)
A low intensity version of this and you don't need a projection area any more, just beam it in directly
note to self: do not stare into laser with remaining eye...
MP3 Search Engine
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
I hope to hook this up to my laptop while playing Duke Nukem Forever with Chinese Democracy blaring on my stereo. What the heck, lets throw Obama a bone and have him in the White House.
This would be awesome for an ultra-portable laptop: just a keyboard without the screen, just project onto any wall ... or use a very light roll-up screen.
While I'm sure the original price tag will be steep, this product could actually have some pretty sweet applications.
Imagine a singular device, the size of a cell phone, that could be a wholly working portable computer. You set it down and it projects a screen wherever you need it. Imagine that projector with something like this, and some sort of mouse replacement, and you'd have all your IO needs on the go. Instead of being restricted to tiny screens and keyboards, your portable device could be competition for your main desktop (which seems to be the route that consumer electronics are heading).
I know I can't wait for the day when I carry around one wallet sized (or smaller) device that is an audio player, a cell phone, and feature complete computer, capable of being used for the same applications my laptop is for, but with far less weight and size. Hopefully with devices like this, I won't have to wait until I'm near dead to enjoy such luxuries.
There's another projector called the Explay Oio that looks smaller: http://www.mobilewhack.com/explay-oio-the-first-real-pocket-nano-projector-on-dispaly-at-sid-2007/
Lately I've been giving some thought about how the hard part of multi-touch touch panel is the projection. Such a screen can be built from a sheet of glass+webcam, but the problem is that projecting an image back onto it requires a rather expensive projector. A $200-$300 laser projector would take this into the realm of 'affordable' technology.
It could also render the OLED technology of the 'optimus maximus' keyboard obsolete- many people have a second VGA port that they do not use. Using this port to display a key map onto an essentially transparent keyboard would do the same. It could also allow people to choose the decoration to be displayed on the rest of their keyboard.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
And just think, by simply using 50 mW lasers, it will now be possible for the masses to skywrite commercials on the cloud cover. Or at the very least, everyone can have their own Bat Signal Device. Or project a 500' Goatse on a downtown sky scraper. I don't see how this can possibly go wrong. -M@
I, too, seem, to, be, having, an, asthma, attack.
On a serious not, I, too, welcome our media-infringing*, entertainment-system, goatse-projecting (don't look into laser with remaining sanity), toothy, overlords.
*do I recall something about needing to pay a fee for having a large enough (practically theater sized) entertainment setup?
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Last year a different company made news demonstrating a monochrome version of their pico laser projector (PVPro) last year. They used LCoS to generate diffraction patterns rather than using a MEM mirror. http://www.lightblueoptics.com/
I own a PK20 pocket projector. It fits in the palm of my hand, does 800x600 native, and uses ultra-bright LEDs with DLP tech to handle the images. It gets 10,000 hours of lamp life but is fairly dim as a result. It is much brighter then the first gen, PK10, but it still gets washed out easily. In a lightly lit room, I can do a 40" image, and in pitch darkness(or almost black), I can project around 60-70" without issue. I'm curious how the brightness of the lasers will be. Will it be able to project a 5' image in a lit room, or will it need the lights fully dimmed? I also wonder what the viewing angle will be, will it be very narrow with a fast drop off to the sides (which would make it less then ideal for portable presentations). Does anyone have any actual specs on the unit?
No doubt!
Personally I cant wait - this is TOO much fun, imagine the on-the-fly presentations you can do with this baby, no longer youll have to wave everyone over to your microscopic cell-phone screen to say "watch what I did this weekend".
Oh wait...
Thats not good...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Bear With Me
I just realized, half the fun of xkcd is sharing - it does help that there is a comic for EVERY occasion.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Very cool product. The name sucks though. Google finds 2.560.000.000 hits for "SHOW".
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Yeah, those scanning electron beams suck so much, the laser has got to suck too. Right??
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
For a brief moment I thought it said "World's Smallest Penis" !
I thought "that's funny I didn't see a webcam in my bathroom this morning" !
Why don't these devices support normal resolutions?
If they are going through all that trouble to make a really cool tiny projector, can't they figure out how to make it support 1024x768 without resampling the image down?
I realize that 848 by 480 is used by some video formats and is 16:9, but still. Anyone using this to show a lecture or demonstrate how to use a computer program is going to be disappointed.
-David
and that they'll insist on it being DRM'd to death
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
anybody remember that Sean Connery scifi flick Zardoz? An good well thought out plot and Charlotte Rampling's knockers could not save it from some hammed up acting and a general public with no intelligence. But one of the cooler points of the film was the rings that all the immortals wore - voice driven data interfaces to the central computer (called the tabernacle if memory serves me well..) and capable of projecting images, movies and information onto any nearby wall with perfect clarity.
we now have projected keyboards, mini laser projectors and infra-red tracking - come on, lets build our own mini computers and dump those expensive power hungry boxes on our desks. if we could finally solve the porblem of mesh computing and get rid of the ISP monopolies then that would be fantastic as well, lets hope OLPC proves the concept viable..
What's up with all these companies from Redmond, Washington being called Microsomething? Is Microvision something that is needed to see Bill's Micro-soft?
I built a scanning laser projector that can easily update 60 times per second. It wasn't using MEMS either, which are smaller and much faster, but it was using Galvos.
Considering your eyes work at around 24 frames per second, I'd say it was acceptable. (TV and Computer monitors run at 60fps as well.)
Now that I think about it, DLP Televisions are using MEMS devices with an array of mirrors that move just as fast... and I've never heard complaints about their refresh rate.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
Sure, small is cool, but these laser projection systems seem better than LCD/Lens. Lower power, cooler, presumably no need to focus. And can easily be made quite portable at a higher resolution.
The scanning electron beam is exciting phosphors that continue to glow long after the beam has passed by.
With a laser on a standard surface, it has to be bright enough to overwhelm the receptors in your eye so your eye still thinks it sees it until the beam gets back to that spot again.
Not even remotely similar.
I dislike LED brake lights because they appear to flicker. I also see rainbows on 4x DLP projectors. Do I have superman eyes?
The whole "24fps" thing was invented by Disney and it relates to smooth *movement*, not lack of flicker.
Cinemas can get away with lower frame rates because film projectors have a duty cycle where each image stays in place for 90-odd percent of the time then they switch to the next frame as quickly as possible (this is why film projectors make a clattering noise - they jerk the film through the mechanism). This means that most of the time there's a solid image being projected.
CRT monitors flicker a *lot* at 60Hz, and they've got persistence of image in the phosphor. To completely eliminate CRT flicker you have to go to 75Hz or more. Even then that only eliminates flicker in the center of vision, you can still see it in the corner of your eye where there's more rods than cones.
With no persistence the human eye can see flicker well over 100Hz, maybe even as high as 150Hz.
No sig today...
No, I see them as well, and so do many other people.
Sorry.
PS: DLP doesn't scan the image line by line, it projects the entire image all at once. This gives it a much wider duty cycle (ratio of "on" to "off") than a scanning laser beam. A wide duty cycle reduces flicker a *lot*, it's the only reason DLP projectors work at all.
No sig today...
The eeeeeeepc was supposed to be $200 too. That stupid OLED keyboard was supposed to be $500. I don't see this going for less than $600 by the time the bean counters get done with it. For $200-299 it's a toy, and everyone will buy one, but very few companies seem to understand that price point. I'll believe it when I see it.
A classroom? Are you kidding? Think about using this in a White House Press Room Briefing to project video evidence of the lies!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I dislike LED brake lights because they appear to flicker.
I see this most of all on Cadillacs, when the parking lights are on, but the brake lights are not - particularly if you turn your head while looking at the lights. The LEDs on Cadillacs apparently are dimmed by a PWM circuit that flashes the LEDs rapidly to simulate the lower brightness level. This is a totally inappropriate way of controlling the brightness of lights on a moving vehicle, because it makes for weird strobe-light effects in traffic, and it's actually more expensive and introduces more failure points than the alternative. It really makes Cadillacs look bad.
The aftermarket LED lights used on heavy trucks do not flicker unless there is a bad connection somewhere. They are designed using the simplest method of dimming for the parking light function - a simple pair of diodes to isolate the brake and parking light inputs, and a resistor in line with the parking light input.
Pretty much all LED third brake light (CHMSL) modules do not flicker at all as they generally have no dimming function and are either on or off. If you're seeing them flicker, you may be hallucinating.
I also see rainbows on 4x DLP projectors. Do I have superman eyes?
No, probably just a brain tumor.
Putting moderation advice in your
Ed is the true path to Nirvana! Ed has been the choice of educated and ignorant alike for centuries! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
(Goddamned "Lameness filter" has lessened the correct impact of this holy rant.)
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny