Sean Captain, TechNewsDaily Managing Editor
17 January 2012 03:13 PM ET

Long before anyone had heard the word "pico projector" — and undoubtedly, many still haven't — the engineers at Microvision were slaving away on their Rube Goldberg-esque invention. Not just a tiny projector, it is a tiny laser projector - meaning it can produce incredibly rich colors without the need to focus. A laser is always focused.

The technology also allows Microvision to add touch-screen capabilities without much trouble because of the unique way it makes images. Other pico projectors, such as the Optoma PK301, light up the entire screen all at once, as an LCD or Plasma TV does. The three (red, green and blue) lasers in Microvision's PicoP projector scan the screen absurdly rapidly, drawing one pixel, then the next, then the next — like the three electron "guns" that scan the screen in a color picture tube.

The process is timed precisely. If something strays in front of the lasers and blocks the beam, the electronics driving the projector know exactly where and when that happened, and they can register that info as an input on the screen.

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(thanks to moissanite, IV MVIS forum)

http://www.microvision.com/