Technology Review: What a brilliant idea? If the screens of your hand helds and cell phones are too small, how about embedding a tiny projector – essentially a projector on a chip right into the device and project on any surface. “Ramesh Raskar, a research scientist at Cambridge, MA’s Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, sees tiny projectors as the solution to one of the fundamental problems with our ever shrinking portable devices..room to display it to us.” Raskar’s team has developed hardware and software that does precisely that
This is indeed a brilliant idea (never occured to me for years! 🙂 ). I read an article a couple of years back that pointed to the growing redundance of computing power in the average PC for the average user on the one hand, and the growing power of the mobile phone on the other, and predicted that the biggest threat for MS in the future would be… Nokia! Since then cell phones have deviated from the computing model – PDA’s are still built into cell phones, but camera phones are the far greater rage in higher end phones (if the N-gage is successful we might see another diversion).
But the point is with a projector a cell phone becomes an attractive alternative against a laptop in the not to distant future.
For the hard core geeks, Tomshardware.com has an interesting project called:
Build Your Own XGA Projector II: Suitable TFT Monitors
see: http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/20041201/index.html