Downloadable cell-phone/iPod video is in its infancy and digital cell-phone television is barely an embryo. But there’s little doubt that video/TV on hand-held platforms is going to be the NBT (next big thing).

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer

Those of us who spend our time thinking about such things see an all-but-inevitable scenario. Once users get used to cell-phone TV and figure out how they want to use it, they will soon become aware of the limitations of doing their viewing on a 2-inch screen - even if it’s a very good 2-inch screen. The makers of head- or eyeglass-mounted displays see this as the killer app that has long eluded them.

But another approach - which may well be complementary to HMDs rather than competitive with them - is to incorporate a small projector into the cell phone, thus allowing people to share photos, mobisodes (mobile episodic TV video), and game play. Developers are working on several ways to create laser-based cell-phone projectors (see our recently released Laser Projection Systems Report), but a novel concept is under development by Light Blue Optics Ltd. (Cambridge, England; www.lightblueoptics.com).

Light Blue has developed a matchbox-sized video and image projector that uses miniature lasers to display video images, thus overcoming the size limitation of conventional projection techniques. Light Blue’s IP includes discoveries made at the Cambridge University Engineering Department’s Photonics and Sensors Group regarding the generation and display of high-quality holograms at video frame rates. That is, you can use it for television.

Instead of using a conventional microdisplay or two-axis scanning mirror, Light Blue constructs high-quality 2D holograms, which are used to diffract the laser light and create the images. The hologram is created with a ferroelectric LCOS panel, but the panel is not used to create a pixilated image. Instead, the panel creates the Fourier transform of the image, which when illuminated by the laser light, creates am image when projected onto a screen. The concept requires no projection lens and offers wide dynamic range in the light output. The hologram-generation engine runs with a commercially available field-programmable gate array chip.

The company has just unveiled a third-generation monochrome demonstrator and expects to show a full-color version later this year. Light Blue says it is working with several strategic partners, and hopes to have products based on the technology available for sale in two to four years.

Light Blue Optics’ approach solves one of the main limitations to very small computing and digital entertainment devices. That is, product development tends to make everything small except the display and keyboard, which must be sized for the relatively large human beings that use them (Blackberry keyboards notwithstanding). HMDs and pico-projectors can radically expand our use of portable computation, communications, and media by decoupling the size of the image from the physical size of the display that produces it. They just have to do it within a very low volume, at very low weight, at low cost, and with high reliability. Oh, yes. And they have to produce very high-quality images. That’s a demanding recipe - but it’s not impossible.