A teeny tiny lens like this could be the key to an embedded projector in tomorrow

A tiny aspherical glass lens could turn your smartphone or tablet into a Star Wars-style projector.

It may not be holographic, but at least you and your friends could sit around a table or look up at a wall rather than huddling around someone’s palm-sized smartphone to watch the latest hilarity on YouTube.

At 1mm x 1mm x .8mm, the teensy FLGS3 Series lens is barely the size of the tip of mechanical pencil lead; and actually, it’s the smallest in the industry. Aspherical glass lenses like this are typically used in optical communication applications, where data is converted and transmitted as light signals. Projectors are one such application.

For now, if you want a tiny, portable projector, you have to opt for a dedicated picoprojector that you can attach to your smartphone or computer through a cable. Projector components are too large and power hungry to reasonably be integrated into battery-powered portable devices like a smartphone currently; they also generate too much heat. Tiny components like this lens are key to making projectors small and lightweight enough to be included in the already-cramped innards of mobile devices.

This lens in particular has what’s called a coupling efficiency of 73 percent. Coupling efficiency is a measure of light transmission efficiency, the amount of wideband light projected through an aperture, taking into account things like reflection and diffusion. Since it has a lower loss than previous models, which had a coupling efficiency of 68 percent, less power is consumed and less heat is created. The increase in coupling efficiency is due to the lens’ higher effective numerical aperture.

The FLGS3 Series lens is also ideal for high-brightness projector situations.

I personally can’t wait for the future wave of mobile devices that include embedded projectors. Pico projectors are cool and all, but as with point-and-shoot cameras, it’s just so much more convenient to have everything wrapped up in one little gadget, than having to tote a phone, and a camera, and a…you get the picture. (I’m a girl, and I don’t even carry a purse — besides going to work, anything I carry with me fits in my jacket or pants pockets.)

Tiny projectors could be great for presentations and sharing information (particularly photo or video). And of course, the obligatory clip of “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.”

From Geek.com

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