Today I found myself discussing the likelihood of mini projectors replacing physical screens on mobile devices. Imagine if you had a tiny mobile device which allowed you to:

  • project onto any surface including a notebook, bag, wall, whiteboard
  • change screen resolution and size according to your needs, for example the size of a novel when reading or the size of a wall when watching wide-screen movies
  • interact directly with the projected images

I’m quite excited by this possibility. My colleague has a different take. He is convinced that mini-projectors will never take-off because they are inconvenient, fiddly and are developing so slowly that other technologies like google glass will overtake them.

And he has a point. Projectors have been around for a long time and yet still fail to give us a nice, clean crisp picture at different distances, light conditions and surfaces. They also consume a lot of power.

Fraunhofer Insect-Eye Inspired Mini Projector

But is there hope? It looks like Frauhofer have developed an LED insect-eye inspired projector prototype which mitigates many of these issues. The technology uses a number of lenses each presenting a different perspective of the image being displayed, allowing the projector to produce a crisp image on various surfaces and at different angles. The projector also uses infrared to detect gestures.

There isn’t a lot of detail in the article but it looks like a promising step. Perhaps my dream of projector displays will come to be after all.