Pico_projector
Texas Instruments
The 3cm pico projector fits at the bottom of your mobile. It has three laser, a DLP chip that is capable of delivering widescreen TV images in DVD-quality images, and a power supply. The Pico Project offers an adequate image for sharing clips or as a highly-portable means for road warriors to make presentations on the fly, but it is unlikely to be the viewing platform of choice for high-definition video.
Some analysts think the first pico projectors will be small, standalone devices that can be plugged into any video source—much smaller and cheaper than existing desktop projectors. This might open up a new market, since it would allow people to carry projectors around with them, such as business people who make lots of presentations or families who want to watch films in their holiday homes.
Making pico projectors means using new technologies. One approach is to use a single pinhead-sized mirror, illuminated by laser diodes, which are very bright, compact and controllable light sources. By steering the mirror very precisely so that it projects one pixel at a time and illuminating it using red, green and blue laser diodes that are switched on and off millions of times a second, it is possible to project an entire image.
Microvision has done that with a prototype projector, about the size of a slim mobile phone. It can be plugged into a phone, media-player or laptop, and produces images at a resolution of 848 by 480 pixels. One of the great benefits of using laser diodes is that they do not require any optics to focus the image. That means the image is always sharp, even when projected onto an uneven or curved surface. The prototype can project images as large as 2.5 metres across and can run for 1.5 hours on a single charge.
Symbol Technologies has built a prototype single-mirror device with a resolution of 1,024 by 678 pixels that is a similar size to Microvision's (about 70 cubic centimetres). Symbol expects to be able to reduce the volume to about 8 cubic centimetres, or the size of a large sugar cube. Single-mirror projectors are expected to be small enough to fit into mobile phones by mid-2009.
