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Hardware

Hello MEMS, Goodbye Monitors 268

Posted by michael from the l999 dept.
ftantil writes "In this article Bob Cringely says traditional monitors (CRTs *and* LCDs) will eventually go the way of the Underwood. I've always liked the idea of seeing the image equivalent of a 27" monitor by looking into a slot in my cellphone, but it never occurred to me that these things could replace TVs too."
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Hello MEMS, Goodbye Monitors More

Hello MEMS, Goodbye Monitors

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  • Monitors Replacements (Score:4, Funny)

    by Medevo ( 526922 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @09:37PM (#3624512) Homepage
    If monitors are every replaced with a slot in your cell-phone or funky geek ware glasses, what are we support to hit when something doesn't work.

    Besides how many more deaths might this cause then cell-phones, driving down the road typing up a document in one eye and driving with the other.

    Medevo
    • But also consider that the balance to this would be a wearable display with object recognition software that actualy HELPS you identify hazardous objects. Of course, by then our cars might be driving themselves.
    • Besides how many more deaths might this cause then cell-phones, driving down the road typing up a document in one eye and driving with the other.

      Well, assuming nobody else (other drivers, pedestrians) are hurt, this is a GOOD thing - it finally puts Darwin back in the driver's seat (groan...).

      Soccer mom is driving giant SUV with 2.5 kids in it. Soccer mom looks into cellphone to see who's calling her. Soccer mom careens off bridge, killing not only herself, but her kids as well. Since there's no offspring left, nobody can pass on the stupidity gene.

    • Stupidity (Score:3, Funny)

      by Taco Cowboy ( 5327 )


      I think I read a quote somewhere about stupidity ... something about people can prevent illnesses, disappointments, failures, but there's no way to prevent stupidity.

      Guess this is another evidence of how people can use high tech to do stupid things.

    • Besides how many more deaths might this cause then cell-phones, driving down the road typing up a document in one eye and driving with the other.

      F*ck typing a document. Imagine playing GTA3 in the other eye!
    • "what are we suppo[sed] to hit when something doesn't work"

      Yeah, but now you really *can* chuck the whole thing in the river like you've been threatening to do for years.
  • http://www.reviewfinder.com/reviews/glasstron/inde x.asp
  • This technology sounds better than HDTV. It would be funny if moore's law put this in front of consumers before HDTV could become dominant. Beams an animorphic DVD right to my eyes. cool.

    • Re:HDTV DOA??? (Score:4, Informative)

      by -tji ( 139690 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @11:10PM (#3624788) Journal
      Huh? This is just another display alternative. HDTV is a digital broadcast format, allowing higher resolution material to be displayed.

      In fact, many of the new HDTV displays are using MEMS technology. See http://www.dlp.com/ [dlp.com]

      DLP is used both for front projectors, and reap projection HDTV's.
      • Right, MEMS in the form of DLP has been muscling in on the LCD projector market for several years and you can get them on Priceline for a little over a grand which is a lot cheaper than most comparable LCDs.
        I think what Cringley sort of glazes over and gets mentioned a few posts down about lasers is a key point.
        In a projector system, be it LCD or DLP the light source is just as important as the image device. The bulbs and cooling systems needed for projectors are expensive and power hungry. LED is never going to be the answer and while laser sounds great I agree with the poster below who discusses the power requirements that a scanning laser would have. The only breakthrough I can imagine in this field that might bring it into the price range of consumer electronics would be much much higher power laser diodes which simply aren't here yet although MEMS could be useful in this field as well. It's quite possible that we'll see incredibly crisp projectors cheaper than televisions are today if visible laser diode power specs continue to rise.
        Until then, DLP is MEMS and it rocks here and now in terms of both quality and price point. I've seen demos of projectors that only cost a grand and look great, but I wish I could buy the DLP chips themselves with controllers on the cheap and play with different light sources. I'm sure that will be doable in time. Carbon arc would be a cool way to show some DVDs on the big white wall of the building across the street. Video could become the new graffitti.
  • Okay, so if you're all by yourself 100% of the time, then sure a headset type of thing will work fine. Hell I have a pair of i-glasses, they work great when I want to watch TV in bed while my spouse sleeps, but what about when you have friends over for movies, or you're hanging out and say "hey, come check out this thing I see on slashdot" you're either going to need more pairs of headsets, or share yours.

    • Exactly, or try to make diner, do dishs when the game is on. Can I hook up my tivo to it?

    • If it eventually only costed $40 USD for a pair of these, it would come to the point that everyone would wear a set 99.9% of the time. By time they reached $40, a wireless solution for them would be produced very cheaply so that it could trasmit and use extremely high quality inputs. You and your friends would just walk over to an information input, sync yourself with the signal, and then view the source on your own set of... well... eyes, or whatever, heh. By time they reached $40 for a pair, they would also be able to transmit video from your environment right to the displays. Is it your greatest desire to have visual selection similar to the Predator? Well, now you have it. Want to view IR in the middle of the night? You got it.

      Now, just invite your friends over, take a minute to download the DVD of the latest action packed or thriller movie to your A/V control center from the internet and broadcast the signal to all your friends. Oh man, I'm starting to drool here.
      • Don't forget to make sure all your friends submit to the RIAA/MPAA body cavity search and seizure prior to sharing your DVD with them.

        In order to display your DVD on their wireless headsets, it would have to be broadcast to them and broadcasting a DVD would be restricted by copyright unless you pay the licensing fee. Don't you read the FBI warnings at the start of the DVDs? (God knows you can't fast forward past them)

        • In order to display your DVD on their wireless headsets, it would have to be broadcast to them and broadcasting a DVD would be restricted by copyright

          Wrong. In copyright law (Title 17, United States Code [cornell.edu]), "broadcasting" a movie is called "performance." Performance is not an exclusive right of a copyright holder; you're thinking of public performance and display (17 USC 106 [cornell.edu]). Performance within a household would almost certainly count as fair use (17 USC 107 [cornell.edu]).

          EULAs presented after the sale aren't likely to be all that enforceable against an individual citizen acting in a private home viewing environment.

    • ...Like the typewriter described in the article. The TV will still be a big box looking like a TV, but the MEMS thingy will be projecting the image onto the screen... so, it will look like a TV, work like a TV, but the insides will be pretty much empty apart from the MEMS and some tuning electrics.
    • You seem to have overlooked the section where they talked about using the MEM as a projector, projecting the image onto a cheap translucent screen.
  • somebody help me stop drooling! i'm gonna become dehydrated at this rate!

  • More details (Score:5, Informative)

    by Triskaidekaphobia ( 580254 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @09:47PM (#3624544)
    Some better descriptions of how MEMS display work here [mvis.com] and here (flash based, but very good) [dlp.com]
    • Thanks! Those two sites have great overviews. I really liked TIs flash on how it works. That was a perfect way to show how flash can be useful.
  • However, LCDs are getting cheaper, and OLEDs are on the horizon. I don't want an empty box, I don't want a box at all. I want a thin panel which I can put on a wall.

    Optimally we would get something that comes in rolls and can be cut to size. Then you just stick a piece of fiber on it anywhere, and have it communicate with you optically. Every pixel should have its own driver circuit, and they should speak to one another with various shortcut buses woven throughout the material. It should also be capable of speaking to other pieces of the material if you make it overlap. This way we could have large (if initially slow) displays. Then you just need a discovery method to determine the properties of the display, and a resolution-independent display method.

    In the meantime; I don't want an empty box. If I have a MEMS-based display, it had better be painting the image directly onto my retina, which is much more useful anyway. I'm willing to put on goggles, though that shouldn't be necessary; within a certain (smallish) range of motion it should be able to track me just fine.

    If we DO use a MEMS mirror-based display, we should be using a large number of mirrors to minimize the depth of the thing and also to maximize refresh rates.

    • Optimally we would get something that comes in rolls and can be cut to size.

      No, optimally we would have a spray can full of self-assembling nano display goo, just lay a template of your choice on the wall, spray away, wait a while, and your terabyte wireless network will instantly recognize the display and start pumping it Bugs Bunny from your satellite feed.

    • I think one long-term problem with relying on panel-like technologies is that the will require a lot more material. Looking around my apartment, I've got a lot of empty walls, which I'd love to have something on (posters and whatnot). It'd be great if I could have some kind of cut-to-size material like you describe that I could simply put anywhere I want and have it display some kind of (presumably non-static) information. But in that scenario, I've got to have maybe four or five square meters of material to cover all the area I'd like.

      Now imagine another scenario where I've got something either overlaid on my vision or inserted directly into the optical signal (progress is being made there, too!). Now I've just got a small device coupled to a computer (which I'd also need in the first scenario) that can change what I see based on where I look. If I look at my north wall, I see a Kraftwerk poster; if I look south, I see the news. Significantly less material and less maintenance, I imagine, but at the cost of significantly more advanced technology. I suspect the panel approach will win in the short term, and will certainly face less social or ethical resistance.

      Any other thoughts on this?

      • Keep in mind that a MEMS display device that could track your environment and overlay information on to your view, has even more important applications than simply putting art on surfaces. As wonderful as art is, mind you. This seems to be THE best display technology to use in the burgeoning field of AR (Augmented Reality) that we've heard so much about recently. Here's a decent overview of AR - note how much all of these systems would benefit from both MEMS display and MEMS scanning technology: http://www.augmented-reality.org/
      • It should be possible to do this either way soon, with recent advances in printed circuits, OLED, and MEMS technology. I'm sure it will continue to be expensive for a while, though. It would be nice to have even if it were extremely slow, though, so maybe someone will come up with a cheap, slow way to do it that requires some kind of computationally intensive encoding process to display graphics... That would be good enough.

        But anyway, you are quite right that you could use a series of projectors and head+pupil tracking to just overlay the video on your vision somehow, or yes to insert it directly into the signal. The latter, however, will likely always require hardware actually on your head. The former is not a bad idea, though it is seriously computationally intensive, requires some very good cameras, et cetera. All of it is getting cheaper but I still think a simple display with a simple hardware interface is our first step.

        There are also some decent reasons to only use a wallcovering; For one, it doesn't require any special hardware on your head. Two, any number of people who can physically view the surface can view the contents. You could always augment it with a projector or goggle system to add private content. And three, you could also lay the material down on cars and anyone could see them. Four, people whose eyes are not factory equipment but are learning to see via machine assisted devices will probably not be able to use a projector system.

        I guess the first step for a system like this is to be able to inexpensively make some kind of MEMS array which can be treated like wallpaper and which can flip over squares for color/no color, or at least black/white to begin with. Maybe you could just do something with an inkjet circuit printing process and little hollow glass beads of liquid crystal. Then you could print to the edges of the paper, and have contact patches which got glued together from page to page for communication.

      • Well, what we need then (for a cheap solution) are embedded eyeball MEMS with a "sunlight" overlay (or the inverse). That way you can simply put violet posters in your walls and attack a "display" to them.

        :) Nice!!

        I can imagine the first use for, say, women: buying their boyfriends some violet tshits (and then ereg_replace (violet_tshits, brad_pit) :)
    • Optimally we would get something that comes in rolls and can be cut to size. Then you just stick a piece of fiber on it anywhere, and have it communicate with you optically. Every pixel should have its own driver circuit, and they should speak to one another with various shortcut buses woven throughout the material. It should also be capable of speaking to other pieces of the material if you make it overlap.

      Oh, and it should also cost 5 cents per square mile and be capable of traveling through time and it should taste like candy when you lick it.

  • Monopoly on MEMS (Score:2, Insightful)

    by rleisti ( 581240 )
    So one company seems to be holding all the patents. I'm not holding my breath waiting for the prices to 'plummet'.

    • Re:Monopoly on MEMS (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Cardhore ( 216574 )
      Or, being able to profit from their invention instead of going out of business, this company will be able to fund research and devlopment to eventually sell MEMS at $40, and soonafter the patents will expire.

  • Microvision (Score:2, Informative)

    by critter_hunter ( 568942 )

    If you go take a look at Microvision's [mvis.com] website, you'll see that MEMS can be used in everything and are the best thing ever.
    Or so they tell you

    More than likely they're just trying to get gobs of money from investors... maybe what Cringely's saying is true, but I can't share his enthusiasm

    • Re:Microvision (Score:2, Informative)

      by Oswald ( 235719 )
      At their current burn rate, they seem to have enough on hand for about 10 more quarters of operation, though they say that 2002 should see a shift to higher revenues because they will actually have some product for sale. Their 10-k is remarkably free of smoke-up-your-ass; they state quite clearly that they are not now, never have been, and very possibly may never be profitable. There's nothing illegal or immoral about speculating on a tech stock, as long as there's no blue sky bullshit being put out.

  • And the #1 reason why MEMS will become popular... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xigxag ( 167441 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @09:49PM (#3624554)
    The cable giants and the MPAA will love retinal displays because that means they can finally charge "Pay Per Viewer." No more of those digital pirates bringing 30 friends over to watch the latest boxing match. Now every pair of eyeballs can be individually billed. Of course that would also mean the death of movie theaters because Hollywood will be able to charge you at home for each one of your little urchins when Harry Potter X comes out.

    • Re:And the #1 reason why MEMS will become popular. (Score:5, Funny)

      by PacoTaco ( 577292 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @12:12AM (#3624980)
      Now every pair of eyeballs can be individually billed.

      If that's successful, the MPAA will introduce legislation that requires you to pay per eyeball. "We don't want to overcharge one-eyed consumers," says the press release.

      • Ok, it's supposed to be funy (and it is :-) but it would be the same. They can charge per eyeball atoms-count if they want. You'll look at the final price.

        Anyway (changing subject), maybe they could make an eyeglass version so that we don't need to work all the time at the office. Just imagine a 11:30 am pr0n session with this stuff :-) (ok, it could be a mess!)
    • Last time I checked, movie theaters charged you for each one of your "urchins" as well. Not to mention the each ticket usually costs twice the price of a DVD rental. BTW.. In case you didn't notice VCR/DVD rentals didn't exactly kill Hollywood now did they?

      Jaysyn
    • I think you missed the fact that a MEMS chip with a laser light source could easily be used to power a big-screen television. You'd watch TV just like you do now -- by looking at a big box -- only it would be the MEMS chip powering the display instead of a CRT (or several CRTs, in the case of some big-screen televisions).

      MEMS is good for a lot more than just personal retinal-projected video.

  • Slashboxes (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kubrick ( 27291 )
    There's an I, Cringely Slashbox (which I have activated). Doesn't this obviate the need for every column he writes to be submitted as a story to /.?

    • Yeah, but now you can submit it as a story as soon as it comes out :)
    • No, it does't obviate the need for his column to be submitted as a story because unless it's submitted as a story, we don't have a /. forum to discuss the implications.

      The solution, I believe, would be to automatically associate a forum to the story, a feature I requested in SourceForge's Slash project [sourceforge.net] in January. It was evaluated as a good idea by CmdrTaco in February, but has apparently sat idle since then.

      ::Colz Grigor
    • Not everybody has an I, Cringely Slashbox (disclaimer: I do), and I don't think it should become a default either (for non-logged-in users) for several reasons: first, because it's fairly large, and people shouldn't have to have a huge chunk of something they don't necessarily want there on their page; second, Cringely is not an OSDN property and as such should not be put as a default top-level link. This is aside from the extremely good point raised by another poster that people such as ourselves get to comment on stories but not on Slashboxes :)

    • No (Score:2)

      by GCP ( 122438 )
      Then there'd be no discussion, and the ideas are often worth discussing. If you don't think so, propose a Cringely category (if there isn't one already) and unsubscribe instead of trying to unsubscribe all of us.

  • I don't see why everything has to run on/off your cell phone. I just don't get it. They bug me enough when they go off in one of my good professor's lectures, but this is going too far. I have to listen to nimrods in when I'm out just about anywhere; now some guy thinks that I would love to ditch my display for something that runs off the cell phone I refuse to buy. Beam me up Scotty; I really want to use your industrial, starfleet issue, bolted to the wall vid displays.
    • I don't see why everything has to run on/off your cell phone.


      I find them distasteful also. But I think it does makes sense from a marketing statement. Cell phones are basically commodity items, lots and lots of people buy them, for all I know they're more common than PC's now in rich countries, probably moreso elsewhere. And just to handle with the digital encoding that most of them use right now requires a certain amount of computing power. So, since they're capable of it anyway, these people think, lets tack lots of other applications (which people of course will pay for) onto this commodity item that everyone is buying for unrelated reasons. Mostly, in fact, stuff that has already failed as pay internet services, but surely the convenience of running it on your cell phone while having an insipid conversation (when of course you should be concentrated on the car which, in theory, you are driving, on a congested road at 60 miles per hour) will suddenly justify users actually paying money for it.
  • I'm waiting for TFTs or their replacement to be cheap enough to replace my desk surface. It will be nice to go back to just writing on to sheets of paper, even if the sheets are virtual and my writing is captured by some kind of Graphiti translator. Ah yes, three by four foot window maker sessions would be nice.
    • Ugh - why on earth would you want to go back to writing? It's so bloody *slow*. I hate writing. It takes forever, and having to differentiate my written symbols for ( { < and [ enough so that any intelligence (human, artificial or other) can decipher them on their own (without context) would really start to annoy me.

      Typing's quicker and more precise.

      I suppose at least for an English speaker though. I guess if you speak a language with characters that aren't neccessarily part of 7-bit ascii, things can get a little more complicated...

      K.

  • Who needs LSD? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by heretic108 ( 454817 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @09:57PM (#3624587)
    "Turn on, JACK IN, drop out!"
    -- ghost of Timothy Leary

    • Re:Who needs LSD? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Angst Badger ( 8636 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @02:56AM (#3625411)
      Spoken like someone who's never done LSD. If I had to choose, acid beats Fractint hands down, even if it's Fractint projected onto my retina with anti-aliased subsampling, real-time zoom, and the appearance of an 84-inch display. Until there are some major advances in graphics technology, no PC can produce the impression of a five-dimensional alien entity simultaneous receding into the past and accelerating into the future while interpenetrating all possible points in the universe at the speed of light accompanied by a soundtrack based on the contents of my subconscious mind.

      Now, Fractint with acid -- that's the best of both worlds.
  • I usually have a bit of reservation for retinal display... If we forget to set the screensaver, the electron beam may burn a few pixels on the monitor... If the MEMS control unit got stuck, guess which part of your eyes will get burned...

    For MEMS based projection monitor, it is conceptually similar to an old fashion CRT. Both scan the {laser,electron} beam line-by-line to create image. The 8lb of lead required for CRT is to protect us again the electron beam. The scanning circuit itself is not that bulky.

    If we can project colored TV image with laser safely and economically today, we do not really need to have MEMS yet. The problem is whether it is technically feasible. In my country, the allowable power for laser pointer is 1mW. Assume the max intensity of any pixel of the "laser TV" is 0.01 mW, a 800x600 resolution require a 4.8W laser. It is a pretty scary stuff...
    1. I can see this kind of technology making laptops smaller; without needing an LCD display, all one has to do is have a keyboard (which can fold up) and a jack for hooking up the glasses with the MEMS display to.
    2. Enhanced "security". Useful for such high-security applications such as looking at your p0rn in the same room as your wife without her knowing.
    3. 3) Blakes 7 predicted this technology back in 1978 [idirect.com] (do a search for "walkman" on that page). Can anyone cite an earlier prediction for this kind of technology in science fiction literature.
    - Sam

  • Privacy aspect (Score:5, Funny)

    by Graspee_Leemoor ( 302316 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @10:21PM (#3624656) Homepage Journal
    How come nobody has stated the obvious yet ?

    It's perfect for pr0n!

    Now your boss will have to look at your facial expression to see if you're working or not; good poker players need never work again!

    graspee

  • The article was more about using these devices to display onto a transparent screen of whatever size you want. That is, they're not talking as much about directly sending this information to your eyes (on a cell phone), but instead making a box that looks just like a television, but has greater resolution, is non-toxic to make, and (supposedly) very cheap and light.

    However, there's something seriously lacking in this article. They claim the current civilian devices cost upwards of $10,000 dollars. But they also claim that the price will drop to $40 dollars. That sounds wonderful. But I don't see something losing 99.6% of its production cost in a short amount of time. Certainly not if this company is seeking to maintain its profits.

    My short summary: sounds interesting, not very probable until there are some economical changes to the devices.
    • With the way chips go thats really only about a decade.

      Sure, won't have it next Christmas -- but odds are they'll be cheap enough to be in nearly everything display wise by 2015.

      That said, you can probably pick one up today at your local high end home theatre shop.

  • Holography? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by eyepeepackets ( 33477 )
    With the projection capabilities of these, they might be useful in many ways. Two parallel lines of these, offset and calibrated, could make a good "in the air" screen. Add multiple rows and you could get a really nice holographic type of display.

    I'm looking forward to following this technology, hot stuff!

  • Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. Yes, the technology exists, but it will be twenty years (if ever) that it gets affordably into the hands of consumers. Remember, we were all supposed to be living on the moon or piloting a flying car to work or using jet packs by now. Actually, all that was supposed to happen by the 1980's.

    There's a lot of good stuff out there that's permanently in prototype.
    • Yeah that is so true. You remember teh one about how there was supposed to be a computer in every home. Yeah that didn't happen either. And since these things are made EXACTLY like computer chips, they will NEVER become cheap enough for the average person to afford. Yup, they will always be $15 rand apiece.


      • These aren't made "EXACTLY like computer chips".

        There's a massive manufacturing difference between a micro mechanical device and doping a substrate to make a semiconductor. About equal to the difference between painting a robot and building one.

        I'm not saying crinkly is right, I'm just saying Moores law applying is not a foregone conclusion. (In fact, it will probably be some multiple of Moores law-- 1/2 or 2X or something.)

        This is, however, the first bits of nanotech, and I'm impressed that TI has made as much process as they have. I remember reading about DLP back 5-6 years ago.

  • Let's see where Moore's law takes us, shall we? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mac Degger ( 576336 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @10:44PM (#3624716) Journal
    Some simple arrithmatic:

    First, lets assume that this kind of tech would only be interesting for me at a pricepoint of some $300 (maybe that'll change when I get filthy rich, but let's not count our Aibo's before they're hacked).

    This takes 5 iterations to get to (assuming Moore's law holds for the price as well as the capabilities):

    $10.000->$5.000->$2.500->$1.250->$612. 5->$306.

    Five generations means 5x18=90 months

    That's 7 years before this tech comes to the marketplace at an affordable price (iow capable of achieving market penentration).

    Seems like OLEDS, Smartpaper or E-ink will have won by then :)
  • LCDs, which, for all their flatness, will always be dimmer, too.

    Dimmer? I have a 17" LCD in front of me, and I still would have bought it even if it was bigger than my old CRT. It's actually brighter, because I can crank the brightness all the way up, and black pixels are still pitch black. The digital interface is razer sharp, and the image quality is amazing.

    I don't know what he's been looking at, but my LCD is the brightest display I've ever used, or at least it seems that way.
    • Never used a good CRT huh? Sit a decent 19" Sony flatscreen CRT beside the LCD and I'd be more than willing to bet the colours are richer and brighter with much much higher contrast.

      That said, todays LCDs are much better than the original batch of 14" and 15" CRTs. Especially considering CRTs lose their colour over time (phosphors wear out). Any graphics (publishing) guys I know replace their CRTs every 6 months due to that.
      • My father develops medical imaging systems, and the highest end stuff they buy are LCDs.

        They remove the color mask, and the things are almost blinding. They are brighter than any CRT is, and they last 10 times as long, and if you replace the bulb, they'll last forever.
        • Ahh definatly. Without the colour masking (which blocks atleast 50% of the light -- even on white) I could see them being quite bright indeed.
  • Sony is pursuing this approach [slashdot.org] and I believe there were a few other MEMS-based articles posted on Slashdot in recent years.
  • I want something that I can watch in complete privacy of turn around and aim at a wall covered with "active paint" to amplify the emitted signal and watch with some friends.

    HD TV's a crock anyway. It'll never happen. Too much money is already being made off the existing infrastructure and the content doesn't merit any increase in quality. Its all just filler between the ads anyway.

    The reruns won't get any better just because you increase the resolution on your set. They were taped with one technology and that where its going to stay.

    And reruns are all we're going to get when Valenti finally wins one for the xxAAs.

    The death of content.
    • Out of curiosity, what does the display device have to do with a broadcast format / standard?

      Odds are to get good use out of a MEMs device it will require HDTV type standards or better. If I recall correctly, some of the higher end HDTVs are using MEMs technology today.

    • Actually, many shows are filmed on film, so it might be possible to remaster them in HDTV. That would require the original film and the will, of course.

    • HD TV's a crock anyway. It'll never happen.

      Oh, really? Then please explain to me just what the hell that big black thing in my living room is. It's got a screen, speakers, and I'll be damned if it doesn't have "HDTV" in big letters on the front. Golly gee willikers, it's an HDTV. And I bought it almost two years ago.

      HDTV has happened already, genius-breath.

  • Oh no, Tom Furness again (Score:3, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday June 01, 2002 @10:57PM (#3624756) Homepage
    This is one of those Tom Furness things from the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Lab. It's been "Real Soon Now" for the last decade. There's a great book from 1999, "The Visionary Position" [businessweek.com] about the mess there. Their four startups from the late 1990s all tanked by the time the book came out.

    It's not that you can't build wearable displays. Many have been built. It's that wearing a display isn't fun. Wearable displays get tiring fast. Try one some time.

    If you really want one of these things, MicroOptical [microopticalcorp.com] sells a VGA-compatible eyeglass-mounted display for $2500. And here's an article about Linux on a wearable. [tldp.org] This guy writes about using EMACS, "awk", and a wrist-mounted keyboard.

    • Like many readers, you seem to have missed the point completely. MEMS displayed are not limited to being wearable displays. They can project images large enough to fill a TV screen. Hell, with a strong enough light source, you could even use one as a digital movie projector in a theatre.

      In addition, MEMS isn't limited to just projecting and capturing optical images. That same MEMS chip can be used as an extremely-fast processor.

      And it's not even vaporware. These things are already being made and bought and used. It's just a matter of waiting for the price to drop to a level where consumers can afford the technology.

      • MEMS displayed are not limited to being wearable displays. They can project images large enough to fill a TV screen. Hell, with a strong enough light source, you could even use one as a digital movie projector in a theatre.

        The "sweep the laser beam spot across the big screen" approach to image projection doesn't work very well. The effect is something like a laser light show; the strobing effects are visible. And if you crank the spot intensity up to a good level for the whole screen, the beam is dangerous. You're really abusing persistence of vision at that point. Nor do you need MEMS for that; just moving mirrors.

        Generating a whole line of image at once (not just one pixel), then scanning that across the other axis, does work. The Scophony system did that in the 1930s, using a very neat technology worth looking up. MIT revived it in the 1980s.

        MEMS devices are widely used for digital projectors right now, but there's a tiny moving mirror for every pixel, and no scanning at all. That's why those images look so steady. If you saw Star Wars in digital, you probably saw it on a TI projector using an array of MEMS mirrors.

        In addition, MEMS isn't limited to just projecting and capturing optical images. That same MEMS chip can be used as an extremely-fast processor.

        Huh? No way. Are you mixing up Drexler-type nanotechnology with microelectromechanical systems? MEMS are electromechanical devices fabbed by photolithography, like ICs. There are some useful devices fabbed that way, most of which are accelerometers for airbag deployment. MEMS are way too big and way too slow to be used as computational elements.

  • Quoteth the article:
    There was something satisfying about pounding away on an old typewriter, getting so far into the moment that the guy in the next room would sometimes pound on the wall asking me to keep it down.
    Reminds me of a hot midsummer night, about 25 years ago. I used to live above a reporter, and late one night, I was trying to sleep, but he was pounding on his typewriters. The sound was bouncing back on the interior court brick walls into my bedroom.

    I used to play trumpet at school then, so I just took the trumpet and started playing loudly through the window. Whenever he'd step out on the balcony, I'd stop. After three times, he got the hint, and I got my beauty sleep...

  • Coming in 2014 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Y-Crate ( 540566 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @12:59AM (#3625130)
    The GameBoy REALLYAdvance(d)

    1mb of RAM (whoohoo! ;) )
    200MB ROM carts the size of salt grains "Now even easier to lose!" - Nintendo
    and a virtual 20ft screen projected directly into your head.....but no backlight

    "You must aim eyes directly at sun or flash of nuclear explosion at a precise angle. Deviation of .95959% will cause failure of display. Tests involving $.20 addition to GBRA proved that added complexity of thing called 'light button' too much for GBRA users." - Crazy Japanese guy claiming to be from Nintendo

    And in other news, Nintendo has acquired the rights to the song "Staring At The Sun" by U2 for use in a future ad campaign. ;)

    Please, no one take this seriously, I don't want some rabid Nintendo fanboys after me....the Atari ones were bad enough"
  • MEMS retinal displays in use today have such high color saturation that they are capable of displaying colors never before seen on a computer of television screen.
    Really?

  • Corrections (Score:2, Informative)

    by Arjuna Theban ( 143564 )
    I'm not one to point out minor mistakes but these ones especially annoyed me:

    1) It is micro-electro mechanical systems. Anyone who has ever read a single article about MEMS would know what it really stands for. It is annoying that noone seems to get a 4-letter acronym.

    2) MEMS is not a product of the "emerging nanotechnology". It is a product of the long-available microtechnology just like its name suggests. We have a Microtechnology laboratory where 0.5um is out minimum feature size and we routinely build/develop MEMS devices.

    Anyone who writes an article about advanced material should study a bit.

    ---

  • What is he babbling about? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by K8Fan ( 37875 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @03:42AM (#3625500) Journal

    Coming? It's already here. What he's calling by the generic name MEMS, Texas Insturments calls by their trade name DLP [dlp.com] (Digital Light Processing). It's all over the place, expecially the digital presentations of "Star Wars, Part 2: Attack of the Clones". Not mentioning the most successful current MEMS technology really costs him some credibility.

  • Don't buy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dcturner ( 455180 ) on Sunday June 02, 2002 @04:21AM (#3625560)
    AIUI CRTs work by having the phosphor giving out light even while it's not being bombarded with electrons. LCDs and projectors work by shining light through all the pixels at the same time. This idea is just using the moving-average idea that your retina uses, right?

    If this thing is intending to shine a light into my eye to match real-world brightnesses over millions of pixels, isn't it going to need a collimated light source millions of times brighter than real-world light? I'm sure that is possible with a laser but do I want something that is only not blinding me because it's moving fast enough? Anybody seen what happens to a film when it gets stuck? Doesn't take long for the frame to burst into flames.
    • Read the article. The brightness requirement depends on the size of the projection display. If you want to project the whole thing on a skyscraper wall, well, you need a lot of light. If you want to project it on somebody's retina, you need a lot less light because the retina is so small. To be precise, you need precisely the amount of light that arrives on your retina from a normal monitor, and that's not very much (and not dangerous at all)
  • I have tried out retinal scanners and I say they are not the wave of the future. First off, its like looking through a keyhole, which is fatiguing. Next, its grainy the same way a laser hologram is grainy [so its not just a problem of low resolution]. After using one for only about 5 minutes, I got one of the worst headaches I've ever had. My eyes hurt for hours afterwards, and were photo sensitive. I do not see this technology becoming mainstream for a very long time, but probably relegated to special uses similar to what holography and other 3d tricks are used for today.
  • I was just wondering how this would affect people with not so normal vision...
    One of the first things I realized after having LASIK done a few years back was the enjoyment of watching TV in bed without worrying about glasses/contacts, etc... (previous vision before LASIK was 20/800... corrected to 20/20).
    So if the image is being beamed directly to your retina, it should be able to make corrections for astigmitism/myopia, what have you....
    Just something to think about..... from the people at Getty :)
  • Now you'll have to hold your cellphone to your eye and use the keyboard/mouse too! You'll need 3 hands.
  • These displays are based on MEMS -- Micro Electrical Mechanical Systems -- tiny machines. They may well reprsent the first big success for the emerging nanotechnology industry.

    Looks to me like Cringley's brain went through a hiccup here:

    Nano != Micro with "reprsent" lending additional cheap-shot weight to the conjecture.

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