New research turn your PDA into a home movie theatre.

The Fraunhofer institute helped make our music collections pocket-size by inventing MP3 compression, and now it’s made video equally mobile. Researchers at the German think tank have crammed a video projector into a box about the size of a sugar cube. This feat of miniaturization could be the first step toward portable gadgets that project big-screen images wherever you go.

In traditional digital projectors—the kind you might find in a conference room or home theater—microscopic mirrors tip back and forth to switch individual pixels on or off. A typical projector requires nearly 800,000 mirrors and a single lamp large enough to illuminate the entire array, all of which add bulk to its frame. The researchers’ mass-shedding trick was to use a single mirror just two hundredths of an inch in diameter. Instead of remaining stationary, the mirror does the job of many by rapidly tilting in two directions, projecting individual pixels across the screen in an oscillating wave that converges to complete a 20-inch image.

Microvision, an imaging company in Redmond, Washington, has incorporated the technology in a tiny prototype projector that debuted in January.—Eric Mika

Via: Popular Science