Recently, while sick in bed with nothing better to do, I VoD’d “The Island” — which is a weird sort of mix between Gattaca and Logan’s Run. In one scene, a character conducts a videophone conversation by slotting his cell phone into a small tabletop dock. The phone beams a large image of the other party onto the wall and, presumably, points a camera up at our hero so that his face can be seen on the other end. That struck me as pretty cool, even in my sick, semi-conscious state.

It’s one way to overcome the screen limitations of cell phones and other handheld devices — just beam the image out of the phone as large as you please. Farfetched, you say? Until now! Apparently, a company called Light Blue Optics has developed a tiny projector that could, in theory, be implanted in a phone or laptop to provide a much larger screen image on demand. Instead of a typical bulb-based projector which is obviously bulky and hot, this unit uses laser projection of computer generated holographic images. The projector has no moving parts, uses very little power (little enough to be powered by a cell phone battery) and has infinite focus. The Light Blue Optics calls it a “personal video projector.” The current version is monochrome, but it’s still awfully cool — and fun to imagine the possible applications (other than kids annoying people by beaming their phones up on the movie screen or in their teacher’s eyes).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Finds, Handheld Devices.