If many Adult Internet operators fear going mobile because the screens are too small, they may get an idea about changing their minds: A number of companies are believed to be working on pocket-sized video projectors that can give a cell phone or PDA device a display the size of a laptop but is still good to go in your pocket.
This kind of projection, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories research scientist Ramesh Raskar told Technology Review, can let you "make an image larger than the size of the device you carry." The key to these new, microscopic-size projectors, the journal said, is a group of lights small enough to squeeze into a PDA-size device but bright enough to show full, crisp imagery.
The first production pocket-size projectors are expected to be available within the next three years, most likely as stand-alone accessories costing buyers between $300-900, though the final goal, according to those involved in developing the devices, is to get them inside handheld devices like cell phones and PDAs. New cell phones having cameras in them as it is now, built-in LED projectors that small and that clear could also prove a huge lure for future cell phone customers, Technology Review said.
But at least one adult content producer isn't willing to just jump into that pool without first checking to see if there is water inside, so to say.
"I would imagine I would wait a little," Homegrown Video chief Spike Goldberg told AVNOnline.com, even as he admitted the concept interested him. "Each new technology coming along sounds promising, but I'd like to see consumer adoption before I throw a lot of effort behind it. I don't want to spread ourselves out too soon with every new technology that comes along, though this one does sound interesting."
Goldberg said that from an operating standpoint he prefers to take a conservative approach for now. "If it's a technology we already run with I'm more inclined to go for it," he said. "If a developer put up a bunch of money to do it, that would be different. But most everybody in our business has to make money with what we're doing, we can't go out and just get support. We all have to stay on the profit side. Risky ventures are not always the best deal."
Lumileds Lighting, a San Jose, California company, is said to have built a prototype such projector, about the size of a pocket camera but using small light-emitting diodes throwing images the size and brightness of a laptop screen onto any white surface, while Mitsubishi is said to be using these LEDs to build an even smaller such projector – the length and width of a credit card, the journal added.
