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Video Projector on a Chip? 123

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the new-annoying-cell-phone-gadgets dept.
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."
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Video Projector on a Chip? More

Video Projector on a Chip?

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  • I've been twiddling my thumbs waiting for these [audioholics.com], from this article [slashdot.org] to come out in colour. I thought that was supposed to be RSN or ADN.

    • Nice! Where can I get an evaluation kit? I'd like to try developing with these.

    • Re:A Step Up (down in size) from this (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DanMc ( 623041 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @06:44PM (#15966479)
      Agreed! Although Light Blue Optics Ltd's devices aren't available on the market yet, and they claim to have no mirrors, prisms, or moving parts. I poked around in Feb when LBO announced their laser projector tech. I couldn't believe no one had tried to make a cheap laser/mirror scanning projector. I found some patents on the technology from the 70's that appear to be used by companies doing the "Pink Floyd laser light show" type devices. They just don't understand what they have could be used to kill off the multi-million dollar LCD projector market, home theater, and even win the LCD/Plasma/OLED/etc TV wars.

      • Re:A Step Up (down in size) from this (Score:5, Insightful)

        by aethera ( 248722 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @08:53PM (#15967043)
        You mean Laser Video. [wikipedia.org] It's here, its just not there yet. I worked for a while for one of those "Pink Floyd" laser light show companies, actually one of the biggest in the world, and we were all trying to make laser video a reality five years ago, even a decade ago. Laser video would have higher brightness and no distortion, even if projected onto angled or curved surfaces, and incredible colors if:
         

        we could get the scan rate higher. The optics just hum drawing those lines (laser video isn't vector scanned like most entertainment laser applications). The beam from a laser big enough to do outdoor video might be 1/16th of an inch or bigger before it even leaves the projector head. So even a mirror just 1/8th wide is needed to scan the beam. And that mirror has to move stop and redraw thousands of times a second. One mirror rotating for horizontal refresh, one galvonmeter for vertical drawing (this is the part that gets really sticky on a big screen) and an AOM for the color changes (a custom grown crystal that will vibrate at different frequencies when in the presence of an RF signal, thus blanking the beam (turning it off and on) and diffracting it (picking the color).

        Also, if we could get the color right. Solid state lasers are helping here quite a bit, though the blue lines could still use more brightness. But until the big solid state lasers come down in price, a lot of the pros (and I don't mean the guy who did the lasers at your rave) are still dependent on their ancient SpectraPhyscics 171. Three phase power, a fire hydrant's worth of water, a drain, two men to carry the exciter, two to carry the head, two to carry the projector, and thats just one laser. Our small shows had three (one for full color graphics, two for beams in the air). Mosat guys are now using sold state yags for their beam effects. The solid state full colors are pricey. I believe the laser show at Hershey Park is using a full color solid state laser, I don't know who else, its been a few years.
           

        That being said, laser video is starting to show up in more and more places, and it is looking really good. Just don't expect to be putting one in your living room any time soon. Aside from the cost, lasers are heavily regulated in the US. One bright enough to replace your tv is going to require a whole host of permits from the CDRH (Center for Devices and Radiological Health) and your state, plus don't even think about doing your own laser display outside, the FAA's paperwork will make your head spin.
            PS, apologies to all the laser jocks if I got something horribly wrong, its been a few years for me, its late, I have a screaming infant and I'm doing this all off the top of my head.

        • Since it's monochromatic, rather than having a moving mirror, you could instead have an LCD and display a diffraction grating on it. Then as you change the diffraction grating, you move where the pixel is pointing. It's been done, at least at low energies.

          I'm not sure quite what you mean by a "full colour laser". You can have three colour laser beams - one in R, one G and one in B. However ideally for full colour representation you want 5 beams. This is because it's monochromatic and the eye's sensors o

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) *
          One mirror rotating for horizontal refresh, one galvonmeter for vertical drawing (this is the part that gets really sticky on a big screen)...

          This might be a silly question, but why couldn't you just have the light from the horizontally-rotating mirror bounce off a vertically-rotating mirror, instead of a galvonometer-controlled one?
          • long ago at university two of us worked on a project to produce a laser raster display. we used mirror-finish metal "drums" with octagonal-cross-section as mirrors, the horizontal scanner being quite smaller and running v fast, the second being relatively larger to provide vertical deflection driven by a stepper motor. the only difficulty we had was trying to get the horizontal scan to synchronise reliably.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cyborch ( 524661 )
          It's here, its just not there yet.

          Where exactly is it supposed to be?

      • There's also Microvision [mvis.com], who already have head-mounted displays that scan a laser across the retina, as well as bar code scanners; they are developing cell phone projectors as well.
      • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Thecarpe ( 697076 )
      Seriously, those folks need to get this out. There is nothing I would enjoy more than being able to watch a podcast of 24 on the bathroom wall / stall door whilst exercising the large veins in my forehead over last night's chili.

      The applications are endless:
      -projecting "kick me" signs on your buddy's back
      -literally labeling people in bars as you approach them (your typical loser, desperate single guy, lush, the "come on, we're going" girl, designated driver, career drinker, future mayor of the drunk tank,
    • The funny thing is that the audioholics.com writeup includes text copied verbatim out of the Light Blue Optics product brochure (which contains only one product) and web site. Gotta love press release "reporting".

  • Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by popeguilty ( 961923 ) <popeguilty AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @06:40PM (#15966464)
    Finally, the resolution of a cellphone VDU on a screen the size of a bedsheet! Amazing!

  • Prediction: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <megazzt@nospAm.gmail.com> on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @06:45PM (#15966484) Homepage
    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.

  • manufacturing efficiency of carbon fibre? (Score:3, Informative)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @06:47PM (#15966500)
    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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) *
      The largest silicon chips approach a billion devices at a cost of $0.0001 cent per device.

      And that's why LCD displays cost about a buck.

      What is the manufacturing efficiency of carbon fibre?

      The carbon fiber in a thirty dollar fishing pole is measured in kilometers. In this device the carbon fiber elements are measured in microns. Only one device per scanline is needed.

      As per my first sentence generally manufacturing costs swamp materials costs when building per unit, but as per my fourth sentence a 1024x768
      • What TFA doesn't mention is that they'll need a tri-color laser diode per mirror asembly. They can be spaced wider than the mirrors if needed. (you'll get a flip of the image if they're aimed properly).

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by kfg ( 145172 ) *
          What TFA doesn't mention is that they'll need a tri-color laser diode per mirror asembly.

          Minor detail. What I was pointing out, without pointing it out, was that OP was focusing on the wrong cost issue; referencing an inappropriate model.

          KFG
          • I don't know that that's correct either; the question is not how much it costs to have a few milligrams of carbon fiber. The question is how much does it cost to attach that fiber to a chip in a way that allows it to be used as an oscillator?

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by kfg ( 145172 ) *
              . . .the question is not how much it costs to have a few milligrams of carbon fiber.

              Exactly. There are are not only a number of other issues more important in the cost; every other issue is more important in the cost.

              It's like getting all worked up over the cost of the wrapper on a chocolate bar.

              KFG
    • They make cars, planes, and sporting helmets out of the stuff. So for chips-size applications: cheap enough by far.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by peter303 ( 12292 )
        Silly argument. Engineers have been making buildings and roads from silica for millennia. And that has no bearing on nanotech costs just like your carbon analogy.
        • Your analogy is the flawed one. I was not drawing any parallell about them being made of carbon. I'm pointing out that it's they're simply using same type of carbon fibers already in volume production, as the article clearly states. And they are not nanoscale BTW (unlike nanotubes). These are merely micron-scale carbon fibers, easily visible under a good magnifying glass.

  • At least CRTs had phosphor "memory" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @06:50PM (#15966516) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • 2.5 KHz is a pretty high refresh rate (Score:3, Informative)

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

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @07:18PM (#15966637)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by mantar ( 941076 )
        Yep. A movie at 24 FPS, on a projector with a vertical scan rate of 2.5kHz will result in each frame being projected about 100 times before moving to the next frame.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MobyDisk ( 75490 )
        The 24fps and the 2,500 times per second refer to two different things. If you stop the projector from rolling, the image would remain. Each image is persistant. But if you stop the laser from moving, the image would vanish. Each "frame" is limited not by the speed of the laser, but by the length of time that the light is burned onto your retina.
      • Considering that movies are projected at twenty four frames per second and our persistance of vision handles that with relative ease,

        Minor correction... Film is recorded at 24fps, but each frame is then projected/displayed twice, so the refresh rate is 48 frames/sec.

        Most people's eyes would indeed have a problem with a 24 frames/sec refresh rate.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by fishybell ( 516991 )
      Have you ever taken a picture of a CRT with a camera? Unless you drop the shutter speed real low you only get an inch of the displayed picture. The parts directly before the inch of graphics are not faded, but rather completely black. The visual dropoff for the pixel is extremely quick, and the dropoff for your retinas is by far slower. A laser based device would have to be about 75hz not to cause noticable flickering, just a CRT.
      • Oohhhh, I hope they make it better than 75Hz. I'm particularly sensitive to flicker, and 75Hz refresh hurts (no pun intended) my head. In my experience, 85Hz is good enough for me, but since most CRTs jump from 75Hz to 80Hz with nothing in between, I'm not sure where the cutoff is.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bodino ( 240393 )
      Ah, but lest we forget, CRTs only had one laser scanning the entire height of the screen. In this system, each scan-line has a dedicated mirror and laser. Err... at least that's what I took from the summary "... and in combination with lasers,... ". Persistence of vision might well be sufficient, when each mirror is oscillating at 2.5kHz instead of one screen at 60Hz.
      • Well [howstuffworks.com] subsitute electron gun for 'laser', and three instead of one and you'd be right. Okay, I'll admit it's one gun(assembly), but three beams.

  • No^2 (Score:4, Informative)

    by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @06:51PM (#15966521)
    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).

    • No ^ 3 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by arminw ( 717974 )
        .....Yes you need a lot of power, but you do not need all that power in a single coherent beam.....

        It is the average power needed to fill a reasonably large screen with an image of good brightness. Lasers only appear so bright because the spot can be focused very small. If that spot has to move rapidly to cover a large area, then the laser power is spread out over the whole area and the sensation of brightness to our eyes is small unless the power of the laser beam is high enough to burn a hole in things if
    • Thank you, that was my question. The biggest issue with projectors seems to be cost, output, and efficiency of the light source itself. Unless the lasers are far more efficient than the lamps used in today's projectors (which aren't bright enough yet require a noisy fan), I don't see how the problem could be solved. I REALLY wish we could get reflective instead of emissive displays!

  • and society marches backward... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @06:52PM (#15966526) Homepage
    "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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 )
      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.

      Actually, it is just what we need, if the goal is to replace personal computers with cell phones. Imagine 10 or 20 years from now, ugly beige boxes have gone the way of the VCR and everybody just carries their "PC" with them in their pocket wherever they go. Wireless Internet access is available everywhere, of course, and while you can still use the small screen on the train, yo

  • 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!
      • On the contrary -- They're complete garbage, like everything Bose makes. Just my subjective opinion of course... But listen to these Bose things and then go into a proper hi-fi shop and listen to a real pair of big, floor-standing speakers. There is simply no comparison, and I mean that in a literal sense. The Bose products are completely embarrassing.
        • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          There's an expression in the audio industry: "No highs, no lows? Must be Bose." That said, the expression is a bit outdated. These days, they've pretty much gotten the highs.... :-)

          In short, you're right. Smaller Bose speakers can't compare with a larger driver. The reason is that lower frequency sounds are less directional. This means that they have to be much louder to be header at any useful distance (which is why your headphones lose their bass response very quickly as you pull them away from yo

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Comen ( 321331 )
            I agree, good sound you need big speakers, I used to work some with Live audio and sound recording when I was younger etc...
            And have had this explained to me over and over, to get some low fequencies you have to have a big speaker cone to puch that much air.
            A guy I used to know well owns this live setup.
            http://www.ratsound.com/ [ratsound.com]
            And designed most the speaker cabnets in that syetms setup, you have to have hudge speaker cones and lots of them to even get any low end outside like this, even then to have good low

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by eh2o ( 471262 )
            "Volume of air moved" is the wrong way to think about speakers (because its a meaningless construction in terms of physics). The correct way is in terms of impedance matching, i.e. efficiency of power transfer across the spectrum between the driver and the medium (e.g., open air, an ear (circumaural headphones), an ear canal (insert headphones), water (hydrophone), etc)

            A large cone attached to a driver is one way to get good impedance matching for delivery of a low frequency, but not the only one and not n
            • Not to weaken your argument; I'm no acoustic engineer, but I have to point out that the only reason tires have treads is because of rain or other water on the roadway. Slick tires are used on certain cars (esp Indy cars) because they actually grip the roadway better, but they're useless when the track is wet.
      • That's funny.

        I half-baked an electromagnet-only flat speaker once. It's an array of electromagnets. The first set goes clockwise, is arranged in concentric cylinders, and is mounted to a stiff object, like a graphite or aluminum plate. The second goes counter clockwise, is mounted on the base, and is arranged as concentric cylinders that fit in between the other set. The first set is connected in paralell to the second set through a simple bridge rectifier. The plate is attached to the base by a groove

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) *
      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?

      As soon as they can make a violin that sounds like a double bass. I canna change the. . .awwww, you know the rest.

      KFG

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Oh, that's easy by comparison. Use 1/4" thick piano strings at extremely low tension, and maybe raise the bridge a bit.... The problem is making it be as LOUD as a double bass. :-D

        The bow would have to be light as a feather to avoid changing the pitch of the string radically at the tension involved, and because of the low tension and the light bow, you'd have to put pickups in the bridge and the player would have to play using headphones in order to hear any sound. :-)

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by kfg ( 145172 ) *
          the player would have to play using headphones in order to hear any sound. :-)

          Oh that's easy to fix, just hook it up to a loudspeaker 8 inches across with a kilo of magnet.

          Nothing wrong with the idea of an iBass of course. The neighbors seem to appreciate mine for some reason.

          KFG

  • Incoming call... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Durrok ( 912509 ) <(calltechsucks) (at) (gmail.com)> on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @06:54PM (#15966535) Homepage Journal
    *phone rings*
    *display activates*
    Princess Leia: Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!

  • oblig. Star Wars Comment (Score:3, Funny)

    by kemo_by_the_kilo ( 971543 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @06:57PM (#15966553)
    so, in 5 years will princess leia send me a video message?
    • "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 entire device would be small enough to build into a cell phone to project an image on a wall
    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?

  • Sweet, now I can (Score:4, Funny)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportland.yahoo@com> on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @06:59PM (#15966560) Homepage Journal
    give a power point presentation to the other people on the bus!
  • 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.
    • Althoug they still have to find out how to provide the light source, a little screen folded inside the phone/pda over which to direct the lasers could be interesting. Especially to watch videos since you could have double or triple size than current screens.
  • 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.

  • Devil's in the details... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by posterlogo ( 943853 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @07:27PM (#15966674)
    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.
    • All true. Even still, you wouldn't need a lens or any parts dealing with focusing the light - unlike a standard projector.

      So while you might not be talking about cellphone size, you'd still be talking about vastly shrinking the size of current projectors - a lot of whose size and weight is currently taken by optics.

      Still...you're not going to see me buying one of these for a long time.

      Tiny motors have "breaks easily" written all over them (although its too small to see).

    • 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

  • Cheaper TVs? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dosius ( 230542 ) <bridget@buric.co> on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @07:30PM (#15966693) Journal
    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.

  • Doesn't sound too good to me... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GreyPoopon ( 411036 ) <gpoopon@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @07:53PM (#15966785)
    From the article...
    "You need something incredibly stiff to oscillate at a resonant frequency of 60,000 times a second (the line-scanning rate of most video displays)..."
    Desai first showed that micrometer-scale carbon fibers can bend like tiny fishing rods by more than 90 degrees and can be made to vibrate billions of times without breaking down.
    So, even at 500 billion times, that would be a lifetime of only 2314 hours?? No thanks. Please post again when they get it up to 10,000.

    "Carbon is normally a brittle material," Desai said, "but in the fiber form it resists breakage. We have some data implying that if it lasts three and a half days it's going to last forever."
    There's science for you...
    • Perhaps the material acts like steel instead of aluminum (I'm not a big CF guy, I don't know). Steel has a limit where it can withstand "infinite" cycles of low stress. Aluminum just keeps degrading each cycle 'til it fails. The term is...damned it...too late to think tonight. Chances are, they figure if the stresses don't make it fail after 10^6 cycles (or whatever they use) it's hit its proportional limit (shit, it that the term I was looking for?) and it won't fail, except due to growth of fatigue cracks

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )

      "We have some data implying that if it lasts three and a half days it's going to last forever."

      This actually makes sense despite the disbelief of people here. If the existing flaws in the material are small enough that three days of operation do not break it then the flaws are not big enough to worry about. Hard brittle materials are not going to develop new flaws under low stresses and it takes a lot of stress to make the existing flaws bigger. Existing flaws concentrate the stress so you need less stre

  • 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
  • "Carbon fiber is twice as stiff as silicon but 10 times more flexible," said Desai.


    Really? How do they do that?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Overzeetop ( 214511 )
      Well, they're talking about two things, they probably mean that the modulus of elsticity (the "stiffness", based on Young's Modulus, expressed in psi or pascals) is double that of silicon, but the yield point, or flexibility (how far it can bend before it permanently deforms) is 10 times that of silicon. It's a dumbing down of the mechanical properties using common language and, no, it really doesn't make sense the way they've presented it if you try and apply logic to the langugae they've used.
  • 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.

  • Hello Virtual Boy (Score:4, Informative)

    by KalvinB ( 205500 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @10:57PM (#15967450) Homepage
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cr0sh ( 43134 )
      Why wait? Such devices already exist (or at least at one time they did, think 640x480 LCD VGA projectors), and are fairly cheap in large enough quantities.

      The whole concept of home-based VR doesn't suffer because of content - FPS games practically beg for HMDs. The reason why you don't see such devices in the home market can be summed up in one word: Liability.

      See, the problem is that no matter how good you make your HMD, some percentage of users are going to experience simulator sickness, even if they don'

  • 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 th
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • ...this is not anything new. Microvision has been working on a similar technology for some time now:

    http://www.microvision.com/proj.html [microvision.com]

    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.

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