Projecting high quality videos onto walls from your mobile phone - coming soon!
Are you old enough to remember when mobile phones seemed futuristic, or when it was customary to purport that they would 'never take off'? Fast forward to 2012 and we rarely stop to reflect about how these small devices have become ingrained into every aspect of our lives. And now mobile phones could be set to evolve even further, if the latest results from innovative Finnish researchers are anything to go by. The forward-thinking researchers have developed a way to project high quality images and video onto any surface you have at hand - whether it be it the smooth wall of your bedroom or a bumpy dry stone dyke! Today we might find these latest developments hard to fathom and strictly for the reserve of science fiction, but that was also the general consensus when the first phone call was made back in the late 1800s. So if the history of technological advances is anything to go by, projecting images onto walls may not be that far off. The Finns emphasise that mobile phones equipped with this type of laser light source technology could be within the grasp of ordinary mobile phone users within a couple of years. At present, mobile phones are capable of showing high quality images and video; however, due to the relatively small size of the screen some accuracy and precision is lost. The team, from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, EpiCrystals Oy and Aalto University, believe they can overcome this detail by using a better laser light source for projectors that will be integrated into mobile phones, meaning photographs and films could be accurately and efficiently projected onto a nearby surface. Small size laser projectors 1-2 centimetres in length can be integrated into many kinds of electronic appliances, such as digital or video cameras, gaming devices and mobile phones. Integrated micro projectors could in practice project images the size of an A3 sheet of paper onto a wall. The challenge now for the Finns' project is to develop a small, energy-efficient and luminous three-colour (RGB) light source for use in the projectors. 'The project has successfully combined multi-technological know-how from VTT and its partners in the project, from manufacturing materials and the accurate focusing of laser chips all the way to production line design. The project was launched last autumn, and we are now entering the stage where we can move from brainstorming and design to building prototypes. It is our goal to prove by next summer that large quantities of the new laser light sources can be manufactured quickly and economically,' says Timo Aalto from VTT. By combining expertise from industry and academia, the team hopes to be able to bring the product to market as soon as it is ready. EpiCrystals Oy will market the nifty technology and the company hopes to become the market leader in laser light sources for micro projectors by 2015. As Vice President of Business Development Tomi Jouhti from EpiCrystals Oy explains: 'We are developing an entirely new technology that is currently not in use anywhere else in the world. At the moment, there are stand-alone projectors on the market that can be connected to electronic appliances and early stage integrated projectors, but their quality and price are not competitive enough. Large electronics manufacturers are extremely interested in integrated projectors, and market research shows that demand for these micro projectors will increase strongly in the coming years. Soon, around two billion mobile phones per year will be sold in the world, and if even a couple of per cent of those contain a projector, we are talking about tens of millions of copies, and the hundred million mark is not far either.'For more information, please visit:VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland:http://www.vtt.fi/?lang=en
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Finland