Sugar Cube-sized projector set for Mobile Phones
All manner of extreme gadgets can seemingly be squeezed into the ever-shrinking form of the mobile phone, but one thing that limits these gadgets' usefulness is the size of the display (and the input options, of course, but that's another story). A smartphone, for example, is only usable if you can actually read the documents you're trying to edit.
One way round this limitiation is to project the display onto a wall or other surface, with the mobile phone acting as a projector. Other companies have been working on this for some time, and now a new entrant has entered the market with what it claims is a projector the size of a sugar cube. Researchers at the German Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering have developed a projector just 16mm x 9mm x 9mm, with the aim of making the device so small it can easily fit inside the confines of a mobile phone.
The projector differs from that of other companies in that it uses a single rapidly moving mirror to project the image, rather than competing technologies, such as that from Texas Instruments, which uses thousands of micrometer-sized mirrors.
Unfortunately, like all these technologies, it's just a prototype at the moment, but it can't be too long before all our mobile phones come with a projector like this as standard.
[Source: EETimes]
