Concerns over battery life aside, the real reason your smartphone doesn’t have a built-in projector yet is because it would add too much thickness to the device. And because shaving millimetres helps add to a smartphone’s appeal, Texas Instruments might have finally found a way to convince handset makers to include a minuscule projector with its new 0.3-inch HD DLP Pico chipset.
DLP chips use an array of microscopically small mirrors that each move independently to reflect red, green or blue light and produce an image. And Texas Instruments has managed to squeeze twice as many of those mirrors onto this tiny chip to produce a 1280×720 HD image with twice the brightness of its predecessors.
And speaking of battery life, this new chipset also happens to use around 50 per cent less power than previous versions. So squeezing one into a smartphone or tablet is even more plausible now given you won’t be trading off as much in terms of added bulk or reduced battery life. [Texas Instruments via Engadget]