Sooner than later, Dallas-based Texas Instruments says your smart phone will also be a large-screen digital projector. It's hoping the experience will be like putting a movie theater into the palm of your hand.
Texas Instruments says it took years before every smart phone boasted quality digital still and video cameras. T-I’s Kent Novak says one of these days, those same phones will feature a computer chip that let’s the phone project a 50 or 60-inch digital image. In a busy room showing of company wares, he displays the picture.
Novak, Senior Vice President, DLP, Texas Instruments: Clearly, that’s the dream. That’s what we would love to see is for it to become that prevalent. If you look at how long that took in smart phones, it took relatively a decade. But hopefully with technology adoption we can move faster than that.
Novak, Vice President of DLP, or digital light processing - says with pricey iPhone add-ons costing between $200 to $250, consumers can project and display images now. But in time, the price will drop, and the projector may just be included with any phone. So a family going on vacation, hoping to avoid expensive movie charges in a room, can just download a film to the phone.
Novak: ...and being able to shine it up right on the motel room ceiling, or in the hotel room on the wall, and it’s similar to having a 60-inch TV there or even larger.
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Or Novak says download a game for the kids and hand the phone to them in the back seat of the car. They can project the game’s image on the seat for a larger picture than what’s on the phone itself. Novak explains the match-book sized chip now used in 85 percent of the world’s digital movie houses has been downsized. So in cell phones, the chip’s as small as a raisin. Novak’s phone has one and that phone goes with him on business.
Novak: I’m an example of a road warrior. I do a lot of customer meetings. There are lots of times we get inside a situation in a small conference room, or meeting at a dinner table where you want to share information, project the image on table cloth. Or inside a small conference room, put a presentation and show that on the wall.
Novak says he puts a power point presentation in his phone, and 20 seconds later, he’s showing it to a room full of people. There’s no heavy projector or equipment rental, disc or USB flash. Novak says the market for these mini digital projectors has been doubling every year.