Sunday, January 7, 2007

Microvision Pico Projector

by Andrew Liszewski

Microvision PicoP (Image courtesy Microvision)Sure it’s cool to have TV and movies streaming to your phone or PDA but since most of that content starts out as an HD-size image you’re really missing out on a lot with that 320×240 pixel screen. Even surfing the web on a mobile device requires a bit of compromise to squeeze everything onto those relatively tiny displays.

While increasing the resolution is an obvious first step you can only take that approach so far before you reach the limits of what the human eye can see. So another clever approach is to increase the size of the screen via a built-in projector. Microvision is apparently developing the PicoP or Pico Projector that is small enough to be embedded into a cellphone or similarly sized device. The PicoP will be able to project a laptop screen-sized full color image onto any surface and will remain in focus at any distance which is important given these are destined for handheld devices.

I have no idea what the resolution, color-depth or contrast level of these embedded projectors will be but at least Microvision has announced they’ll be officially unveiled at CES which hopefully means we’ll see actual working prototypes.

(c) www.ohgizmo.com

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