"Flat panel LCDs are the rage today, but that's not what I am talking about. I am talking about yet another type of display that promises to have a big impact on computers, televisions, and just about anywhere else you can imagine watching a moving picture -- even at the movies. These displays are based on MEMS -- Micro Electrical Mechanical Systems -- tiny machines. They may well reprsent the first big success for the emerging nanotechnology industry....
MEMS are computer chips that perform mechanical and sometimes chemical functions. Today, they mainly function as the heart of optical data and telephone switches, sending billions of photons each down the correct piece of optical fiber toward its destination. MEMS in a computer display would control a scanning mirror less than one square millimeter in area. This microscanner is designed to move in both horizontal and vertical directions so a single beam of light can be steered to project a complete video image.
MEMs displays can use the same chip for a display of almost any size. All that matters is how bright the light source. Put a MEMS chip in your mobile phone and scan a low power beam straight into your eye, not even bothering with a screen. In this case, your retina is the screen, and the display can easily match the video quality of a big screen TV. Scan a different signal into each eye, and you have 3-D. MEMS retinal displays in use today have such high color saturation that they are capable of displaying colors never before seen on a computer of television screen.
Use a more powerful light source like a laser, and the same MEMS chip can sit at the back of a television box, shining a high resolution image against a translucent screen.... Put the screen on the wall and that MEMS chip becomes a video projector.
But wait, there's more! Send the light the other way by using the MEMS chip to scan a scene and reflect it against a photoreceptor. Now the scanning engine can power a scanner or a camera. It can even become the basis of artificial sight -- bionic eyes.
I am not making this up....
The Microsoft of the MEMS display business is Microvision, from Bothell, Washington. Microvison, which has almost 200 patents on MEMs and retinal displays, was founded years ago to exploit work in this area done at the University of Washington. Microvision makes those expensive military displays, but they have said with a straight corporate face that the eventual target price for their MEMS-based scanning engine is $40." [The Pulpit, via Slashdot]
Of course, the reverse side is that when these types of gadgets become mainstream someday, the library should already have shifted to meet the information needs of patrons who can access its services electronically from anywhere.
And that's not even counting all of the ways I'd be drooling over this type of technology as a consumer!
Sunday, June 02, 2002
