

Coming Soon, to Any Flat Surface Near You - bootload
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/business/30novelties.html?ex=1364529600&en=3ec9cc1ae1455f6c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

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mixmax
This is an incredibly cool technology, and the basic idea is pretty simple:
You take a RGB LED, modulate the intensity of the red green and blue diode so
that the light output matches the scanlines of your projected image. Then you
project it onto a mirror mounted on a piezo electric crystal which oscillates
to match the scanlines. And voila - you have a projector.

The inhibiting factor has been that RGB LED's have been quite expensive but
they are rapidly dropping in price. The blue ones are particularly pricey.

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mhb
That sounds reasonable, but how many LEDs are they using? RGB and blue LEDs
have been under $1 for quite a while.

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iamwil
they might be bigger ones, or better focused ones (I'm guessing). The ones
you're thinking of are mostly used as indicators, so I'm guessing it doesn't
matter where they shoot their light.

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mixmax
exactly - the brightness is what costs, and a LED for a projector needs to be
pretty bright.

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iamwil
I wish the title of the article wasn't so vague.

But that aside, there are a couple things that the article failed to mention.
The obvious use is to watch TV and movies on it. However, I remember other
interesting research uses for projectors.

The first well-known one is a major part of a multi-touch display. Of course,
with OLEDs, it might be possible to make one without a projector--it just
won't be as big.

Second, Johnny Lee, in addition to his Wii IR goggles, has previous projects,
where he can detect the orientation of portable display surfaces (like a small
board) by projecting gray codes. He cheats a little by having photo sensors at
the corners of the small board, but the idea is to be able to project onto any
surface, and for the projects to 'follow' it, as you move it around.
<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/thesis/>

As a curiosity, there was a paper on HN a long time ago about seeing the back
of a card. It used a projector to project patterns(gray codes again, I think),
on the card, and a camera to read the reflection of the color off a book page
facing the back of the card. Doing this, they were able to reconstruct the
image of the card.

Lastly, it doesn't have to be a projector of visible light. If you had another
'channel' to project into your environment from your phone, you can probably
detect what's out there

I personally want contact lenses that does augmented reality. because one is
in each eye, it should be possible to create the illusion of floating displays
in the air. That way, you can see it, an no one else would.

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mhb
I'm waiting for laser projectors: <http://www.colorvision-
lasers.com/displays.aspx#>

Yes - I may be waiting a while.

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papersmith
This is actually one of my imaginary gadgets in high school. There's also
laptops with vertically rollable fabric screens.

