A Widescreen Laser Projector In Your Pocket 189
Edis Krad writes "Redmond based company Microvision is in the last stages of developing and releasing a portable, laser-based projector, code-named 'Show WX.' The projector has a resolution of 848 by 400 pixels (WVGA) and, since it uses laser-scanning rather than LCD to form the images, it does not require a lens to focus, allowing it to display images virtually in any surface. The device comes with its own user-replaceable battery, which means you could take it with you anywhere you want. Although there is no pricing information on their website, according to this local news video, it could cost at least $200."
Can It Function as a Back-Lit Rear Projector? (Score:5, Funny)
Because you're sitting on a goldmine if it can.
What? It can't? *sigh* Oh well. A man can dream, can't he? A man can dream
Re:Can It Function as a Back-Lit Rear Projector? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it can: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFmWAwttqZ8 [youtube.com]
Re:Can It Function as a Back-Lit Rear Projector? (Score:5, Funny)
Why on earth don't they this on their website
Because they accidentally the whole thing.
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The living room "simulator" actually seems to give a decent idea of how bright it is -- in any sort of lighting at a distance >100", the image is basically unviewable.
The "source selector" is pretty pointless though.
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Because so you are prepared for the headache that those line-scanning high-energy beamers will give you too.
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Oh you can bet on me doing that, as soon as it comes out. But why stop at that. There's still meatspin (does not work, in gay Cologne. :P) and 2girls1cup (should work ^^).
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And project an image of my ass onto a car window as I pass someone?
No, but this [oodle.com] can. :)
What I don't understand is why, in TFS, they claim "...since it uses laser-scanning rather than LCD to form the images, it does not require a lens to focus, allowing it to display images virtually in any surface." What the hell does the method of focussing have to do with the projection surface? I mean, laser projector is cool but it doesn't change the laws o' physics, captain. Small diode lasers only tend to stay coherent for a short distance (sometimes only inches) so this should wor
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Dear God and/or Taco: please, make it stop.
Or... (Score:4, Funny)
Are you just happy to see me?
Price is expected to be (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Price is expected to be (Score:5, Interesting)
Dang, $200 would have been awesome.
It should get there, in a couple years. The reason it will be so expensive to start with is two new technologies in one: Scanning MEMS mirror which projects the image, and the green lasers inside, which have not been produced before.
Microvision has been waiting for green laser supplier for a long time. Corning has built a facility and is ramping up production of green lasers now.
When green lasers are available in quantities of millions, the laser projectors will be built into blackberries, iphones, digital cameras, etc.
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what's wrong with red lasers?
Re:Price is expected to be (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't produce a very good green. Frequency doubled IR is not an option either because you can't modulate the beam fast enough.
Re:Price is expected to be (Score:5, Informative)
Frequency doubled IR is not an option either because you can't modulate the beam fast enough.
Actually, the Corning green lasers in the ShowWX are freq doubled. True green is not expected for several years at least. More on the Corning lasers here [forbes.com].
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Guess it only used to be a problem then ... although the proof is in the pudding of course.
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Guess it only used to be a problem then ... although the proof is in the pudding of course.
It makes *pudding*, too?! Jesus Christ, sign me up for one of those bad boys!
I hope it has a Butterscotch mode...
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Re:Price is expected to be (Score:4, Informative)
*eyebrow* This is additive not subtractive mixing. So, yes, the G in RGB. When you develop a laser that subtracts light, let me know, I want to invest.
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*eyebrow* This is additive not subtractive mixing. So, yes, the G in RGB. When you develop a laser that subtracts light, let me know, I want to invest.
One concept: destructive interference.
... don't really know from the top of my head *shrug*
I've only done college level physics so my knowledge on this could be sketchy. But when two beams of light interact they get brighter at some points and dimmer at other points. However, it might just be that both of these interactions are absolute. So either no light, or double light
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And everything inbetween [wikipedia.org], actually.
Two sine waves of the same frequency and amplitude will, when added together, result in a single sine wave of the same frequency. The amplitude of that sine wave depends on the phase angle (0 to 360 degrees) and will range from 0 (flat line) at 0/360 degrees to 2 at 180 degrees.
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Sure it applies to light. (I think. ^^) And it works only with laser, because only there the waves are perfectly in sync. I think that is GPs point.
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Green laser pointers have been around for years, how are they different to the ones that are used in these projectors?
Re:Price is expected to be (Score:5, Informative)
Its why I have been looking at the LED based ones, but they are just not bright enough for my purposes. Give me one of these with just a 10k laser life AND an HD out? I am as good as sold.
Re:Price is expected to be (Score:5, Informative)
Its why I have been looking at the LED based ones, but they are just not bright enough for my purposes.
LED-based on the left, laser projection on the right: http://www.picoprojector-info.com/files/picoprojector/images/DSC_0016.preview.jpg [picoprojector-info.com]
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The "make it up in volume" theory doesn't work when you're not actually making any profit.
It can. If you can eat enough of a loss to start selling under your cost, sometimes you can get the production cost low enough to turn out a profit. That's what "make it up in volume" means.
Meetings (Score:2, Interesting)
This could be very useful in the cooperate world. Instead of dragging around charts projectors and things alike; have this nifty device in your pocket and your presentation is ready.
Re:Meetings (Score:5, Funny)
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I was thinking along the lines of "Cool! Pocket porn projector!."
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Now nerds can communicate with girls (Score:2, Funny)
Just Imagine:
*** Start power point presentation ***
Slide 1:
Objective - To go out on date
Slide 2:
Reasons -
- Have money
- Provide intelligent conversation
- Will Listen
Slide 3:
Places -
- Movies
- Beach
'Hey wait, where are you going?'
*** End power point presentation ***
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I'd argue there's more to making a presentation that simply available technology.
Sadly, the amount of horrible Powerpoint presentations one has to witness in this world means my views are not very common... (at least at the point when average person, bored during presentation while on the audience, has to be a presenter and simply uses Powerpoint as a cheat-sheet)
Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
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Can somebody explain how it works? (Score:2)
Laser projector? How can you project a raster image using a inherently vector system?
I don't get it. How does it know how big the pixels should be?
(Or maybe it's obvious and I just need a beating with the clue stick here)
Re:Can somebody explain how it works? (Score:4, Informative)
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Think: CRTs use an electron beam ... maybe you can figure the rest out all by yourself.
Re:Can somebody explain how it works? (Score:4, Insightful)
CRT's project an electron beam into a fixed-size phosphor pixel on the screen. This is projecting a laser dot onto a wall (or whatever), I was mostly just not sure how you get an image instead of just a series of lines appearing.
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Convex mirrors would do it.
You pretty much don't want a perfectly collimated beam coming out because of all the safety and health regulations. Since this projector's lasers would have power on the order of tens of watts, you would get nice burns in your retina the moment a scanning mirror fails.
I am still not sure how they would stop people losing eyesight by staring up close into the beam...
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I can buy a propane torch for $10 [hardwareworld.com] and I wouldn't want to stare up close into that while it's lit. My 10-year-old bought a bb gun at Walmart and it certainly isn't eye-safe.
My question is how they prevent it from flickering badly, since (unlike phosphors in a TV) there is no persistence from a projector screen. Seems like you'd need an extremely fast refresh rate, perhaps displaying each frame 4 times or
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Only with color TVs is there any semblance of a "dot" of any kind, due to the method used to produce different colors. B&W TVs don't have any notion of "dots"
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Actually CRTs just blast the beam to the screen segment, which will often reach a few holes in the shadow mask. This will often limit the "resolution" as it will become more blurry the smaller you go, but there isn't a fixed size. And they only need the shadow mask to seperate the colors, black and white CRTs don't have them.
And aperture grill CRTs are completely free regarding vertical scanning resolution.
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Go back in time a bit and think about monochrome CRTs. These projected an electron beam on to a sheet of phosphor-covered glass. Now look at CRT projectors. They do exactly the same thing, with three glass screens, and the light shines on to the screen.
Remember that the laser dot isn't a point in the mathematical sense. It has size. Move it from left to right quickly and you get a line drawn (with help from persistence of vision) and when you move it down a bit and draw another line underneath, you ge
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Only color TVs which need to aim at a pixel of given color.
Think back to b&w TVs which had no pixels. Extinguish the beam on pixels you don't want lit.
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Laser projector? How can you project a raster image using a inherently vector system?
I don't get it. How does it know how big the pixels should be?
(Or maybe it's obvious and I just need a beating with the clue stick here)
The light from the three RGB lasers is scanned in rows just like the electron beam in a CRT. To sweep the angle, a tiny mirror flexes very fast. The technical challenge for these projectors has been switching the mirror fast enough and getting decent performance from miniature red green and blue lasers. I think the blue one was the tough nut to crack.
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You know how a TV tube works? The electron beam sweeps back and forth really fast, painting each dot on the screen? Well the laser in this thing is like the beam and the wall is like the screen. Since the laser beam can travel a great distance and still make just a small dot, so the image are in focus at different distances. Of course the farther away the screen is, the farther apart the dots are, so the image would become grainy at some point.
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If the beam diffusion angle or wtfever it is called (I am not a physicist, mathematician, etc, sorry) can be sufficiently tuned the dots never get further away from each other; in fact, they might even overlap. They will be spread out, though, so they will get dimmer.
This seems like a pretty decent way to get full HD at home.
Re:Can somebody explain how it works? (Score:5, Informative)
This has been done before, IIRC Samsung released one of the first TV quality raster scanning system for laser shows.
Basically a standard laser show setup uses multiple lasers (to get your RGB) combined into a single beam then passed through a device, such as a PCAOM, which acts as rather like a programmable colour filter. (this isn't the only way it can be done with solid state lasers).
Two sets of mirrors can be steered in the X and Y axis to draw your shapes, beam effects, etc.
In the case of a TV or other raster displays the beam is steered much like you would an electron beam on a regular TV. It scans a horizontal line, moves down scans across, repeat. You can switch the direction of the scan (left to right, then right to left) on alternating lines to speed up the scan rate.
Wikipedia has some info on Laser TV's in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_TV [wikipedia.org] and LaserFX has some info on PCAOM's if you're interested in the older tech: http://www.laserfx.com/Backstage.LaserFX.com/Archives/Archives6.html [laserfx.com]
Early systems actually used multiple projectors overlapping or drawing the first 3rd, 2nd third, etc of the image to make up for slower scan rates.
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This has been done before, IIRC Samsung released one of the first TV quality raster scanning system for laser shows.
It has also been done with electron beams in arcane devices known as CRTs.
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One is raster scan, which others have mentioned, which involves moving mirrors and modulating the lasers. I've been told this is not practical due to the physical difficulties of controlling fast moving mirrors. (But this advice is 20 years old.)
The other is the Texas Instruments micromirror approach. The laser beam is diverged to cover the whole mirror chip, and individual micromirror movements modulate each pixel.
Re:Can somebody explain how it works? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this is where I'm tripping up. I always assume laser light is perfectly collimated so that the projected dot at 1cm is that same size as at 1m, but I guess the projector uses slightly unfocused beam to generate a larger dot with relatively short increases in projection distance to avoid getting just a collection of horizontal or vertical lines appearing instead of an image.
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Well, remember that the pixel is created by turning on the laser while the mirror is passing by the point where the reflected beam would hit the target. If you leave the laser on just a little while longer, your pixels will be larger, in one dimension. In other words, instead of a grid of points: . . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
you have a grid of lines:
_ _ _ _
_ _ _ _
_ _ _ _
The vertical gaps would be an issue at long distances, but there's no reason the horizontal gaps should be particularly large.
Of course the effect
Great for bedtime (Score:5, Interesting)
Project a movie or an e-book on your ceiling. No more tired arms from holding books up. I'm getting one of these babies!
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Re:Great for bedtime (Score:5, Funny)
During my bedtime, I also like to look at movies and publications, but my arms get tired for a very different reason. I don't think a laser projector would really help...
hey mr. DJ (Score:2)
mini laser projector + netbook = crazy disco scene that can fit in your pocket. whip it out on the subway on friday night with some dance techno and colorful visualizations to have the swingin'est ride to the bar ever.
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winamp the 1.04 milkdrop and the 3d presets
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Oh, Lords of Kobol, please make it stop!
(not sure how popular it is at your place, but recently teens here on the stupid side of bell curve tend to listen as loud as possible to crap music on crap loudspeakers of their cellphones while walking on the street/etc.)
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They exist people who don't care to party all night long. I am sure after coming home from a long day of work and some dude turns your subway in to a rave, you will find someone "accidentally" smashing it.
Vaporware. (Score:3, Funny)
There's no price, and demo of this thing working, because it doesn't exist yet. But they do have CG mockups in 10 different colors!
I spoke too soon (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a video from dl.tv: http://dl.tv/2008/01/ces_2008_microvision_show_proj.php [dl.tv]
There's no mention of battery life, and it looks like the framerate might be terrible, but it's a real product!
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it looks like the framerate might be terrible
I'm sure the framerate is just fine. The problem is: the camera isn't in synced with the display's scan rate, and 2) lasers can turn on and off (go from full off to full on) a HELL of a lot faster than anything on usual display devices. (phosphors in a CRT unload their photons over a longer period of time, LCDs switch slower, etc) I imagine the real scan rate is actually has to be higher than 75 hz, just because of that phenomena, either that or they have to have
Re:Vaporware. (Score:5, Informative)
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That's normal for Microvision. I don't think they've ever actually released a consumer product. I'm still waiting for their super-tiny hi-res wearable displays from circa 1998.
Power and brightness... (Score:5, Insightful)
... are the two limitations of small projectors. They claim 10 lumens while most conventional mains-powered projectors are typically 1000-2000 lumens. That makes the product usable alone in a darkened room but not much of anywhere else. Their claim of "movie capable" battery life rather than a specific time period leads me to conclude that they watch shorter than average movies.
I predict that, like the pen scanner, [planon.com] this proves to be a geeky cool but practically useless device.
Re:Power and brightness... (Score:4, Insightful)
The trade-off is performance vs size. You can take this thing anywhere and you don't need to plug it in to the wall.
Re:Power and brightness... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Hm, need for a "darkened room"...that could actually be an advantage when inviting somebody for moviewatching ;p
(yes, I eagerly await lower prices, hopefully by this Autumn, on DLP (or what was the name of that TI micromirror technology) based miniprojectors)
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DLP picoprojectors are already pretty cheap, the problem is that it still needs to be setup like a traditional projector because it uses projecting optics ... whereas with a laser projector it's easy to project in focus on any surface from any angle (although you would need programmable keystone correction to make the most of that).
Summary is Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
It's called the SHOW WX, not SHOW WV. FTFA: "WX stands for "wide experience", referring to the wide image format, wide color range and wide always in-focus operation."
As a VJ, I could really use one of these instead of hauling around my huge HD projector, since I only project at 320x240 anyway (to keep real-time video mixing fast). Hopefully the battery really lasts as long as a movie though!
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Man no kidding, we're just buying a second projector to play out with (we as a 3 man crew mix Dnb and psytrance) after the first one fried. A pocketsized projector that matches the lazers? Totally win, even at 500$. I remember seeing really cool demos done with lazer projection and fog machines too. I wonder what one of these looks like through haze.
Wake me up (Score:2)
when the resolution is at least 1024 wide (1280 preferable) and it can project with more than 10 lumens of light! (Their Macromedia Flash demo thing on the website is waaaaaay optimistic about how bright it will look). The slashvertisement site "specs" also conveniently leaves off critical information such as what resolutions it can accept (and downscale), what types of cables are included, what type of battery and real estimates of battery life, exactly how much power does it pull (can you operate it liv
Sharks (Score:2, Funny)
When? (Score:2)
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When?
First small quantities of the accessory projector are promised "this summer". Embedded in phones about a year after, as green lasers become available in large quantities.
I think I speak for all of us when I ask.. (Score:2)
Does it run on sharks?
Can I get it... (Score:3, Interesting)
In 1080p and capable of 120hz refresh rate?
???
Sure... (Score:2)
Just add a few extra zeros to the price. Five should cover it, but you might want to have that sixth zero in reserve for contingency. :-)
Nice name (Score:2)
Better Microvision than Macrovision [wikipedia.org].
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For teh lulz (Score:2)
It's is SO going into an iPhone in 2 or 3 years. From that point on consider this : people use the motion sensor to stabilise the image, which will be pretty cool, and secondly, people start making a whole bunch of iPhone apps to make all sorts of "pranks".
Hard to tell what they'll come up with but you just know that kids will have a field day with that. And by day I mean decade.
Anedcotial experience with laser beamers. (Score:2)
I heard from a friend who works at a cinema, that some years ago, they tried to build laser projectors. They were incredibly sharp and brilliant. So brilliant in fact, that the viewers got their faces painfully burned. (Dunno if just from passing by. Or from looking at it, which would mean their eyes got damaged too.)
It may only be an anecdote. But I do not trust these things. ^^
Oh, and with the massive parallelism of LCD and DLP displays, I was happy for the not very healthy flickering of line-scan display
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DLPs do flicker (as do plasma displays). It's just at a high enough frequency you don't notice.
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I do work at a cinema. Your "friend" is talking fantasy. The standard for years past and years to come is and will continue to be Film. Who would have access to a full color movie-capable scanning laser projection system? I can find no evidence to support the claim that any audience in cinematic history has had their faces BURNED from laser projection, not even to say that this has ever existed in a cinema.
For those curious about what the !@#$ top poster is going on about and how the Microvision scanning la
848 x 400? (Score:2)
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It should have been 848x480, at least according to the specs on the site.
Sharks with lasers. ur doin it wrong. (Score:4, Funny)
I see this as the perfect solution. Now all I need is the problem to solve.
Perhaps if I coupled this with an iPod and beer the problems would present themselves.
10 lumens! (Score:2)
Don't believe the flash
don't
don't
don't believe the flash
seriously, 10 lumens, with all lights off in a closet it might be ok...
OMG!!!
Portable porn projector!
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Language barrier (Score:2)
"In" any surface? How am I supposed to see it?
The line between "in" and "on" varies per language. The submitter is likely not a native English speaker.
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The submitter is likely not a native English speaker.
Anyone other than Slashdot one of the main jobs of an editor is to fix errors. Here they rely on the submitter and the howls of protest in the comments.
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So would the unfortunate people around you who are exposed to your choice in "favorite movies" as they're projected not-so-discreetly onto some convenient surface.
You sick, sick person.
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**((It's really worth the time to print out the marker if you haven't seen this yet))
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If they'd pump it up to, say 200mw, then they could have a lot of fun. 25mw is enough to pop a black latex ballon.
Bill