Whatever happened to pico projectors embedding in phones? – KGOnTech

Back around 2007, when I was at Syndiant, we started looking at the pico projector market, talked to many of the major cell phones and several PC companies, and almost everyone had at least an R&D program working on pico projectors. Additionally, there were market forecasts for the rapid growth of embedded pico projectors in 2009 and beyond. This convinced us to develop a small liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) microdisplay for embedded pico projectors. With so many companies saying they needed pico projectors, it seemed like a good idea at the time. How could so many people be wrong?

Here we are six years later, and almost no pico projectors are embedded in cell phones or much else. So what happened? Just about the same time we started working on pico projectors, Apple introduced their first iPhone.    The iPhone overnight roughly tripled the size of the display screen of a smartphone such as a Blackberry. Furthermore, Apple introduced ways to control the screen (pinch/zoom, double-clicking to zoom in on a column, etc.) to better use a small display.   Then to make matters much worse, Apple introduced the iPad and the tablet market took off almost instantaneously.    Today we have larger phones, so-called “phablets,” and small tablets filling in just about every size.

Additionally, I have written about before the use model for a cell phone pico projector shooting on a wall doesn’t work.   There is rarely a dark enough place with something that will work well for a screen in a convenient place.

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