By Roland Piquepaille
It's not the first time I'm telling you about pocket projectors (check here for example). But now, a small UK company, Light Blue Optics, has developed an holographic projector so small that it could be integrated into your laptop or even your cell phone. In "Holographic projector for your future PDA," PDA Live.com writes that the holographic laser technology used by the company relies on very few components, meaning these future projectors should be cheap to produce. The company says these projectors should be on the market in the next two to four years. Read more...Here are the key excerpts from the article.
The company's new technology requires only a very few components, which means the projector can be made relatively cheap and very small, so that it could be integrated any portable device. The company also created as special chip that is capable of generating and displaying high quality holograms at video frame rates.
How does it work? A hologram pattern, which to the naked eye looks like a collection of random dots, is displayed on a small liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCOS) microdisplay - a tiny, very fast liquid crystal display built on top of a chip. The hologram patterns are calculated by Light Blue Optics' proprietary "hologram chip" so that when the microdisplay is illuminated by laser light, the light interferes with itself in a complex manner through the physical process of diffraction which, when carefully controlled, results in the formation of a large, high quality projected image on, for example, a screen or a wall.
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As shows this illustration, the images are formed through the process of diffraction (Credit: Light Blue Optics). |
The company showed a working prototype at St John's Innovation Press Day in Cambridge, UK, in November 2004. It also issued this press release.
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Here is a picture of this tiny holographic projector (Credit: Light Blue Optics). |
And when will products be in the shops? The company answers.
At present, Light Blue Optics has a lab-based demonstrator, which converts a standard composite video signal into high-quality 2D holographic video, in real time. The hologram generation engine runs in a commercially available FPGA (field-programmable gate array) chip, whose design extends naturally to cheap mass production. Other processing platforms including low-power digital signal processing (DSP) ICs are also under development.
Light Blue Optics is working with several strategic partners to further develop this technology into real products. It is envisaged that devices based on this technology will be in the shops in the next two to four years.
I can't wait for Christmas 2006.
Source: PDA Live.com, December 27, 2004; and various websites
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