Pico Projectors and the Perfection of Flesh Tones- A Cautionary tale

You have may well notedthe ads for the cell phones with Pico projectors on television the last couple of weeks.  Now that this these units are in the wild and inescapable, the era of forced viewing has finally arrived.  Even the product ad seems to promote this with a scene where a third co-worker enters a lunch room proclaiming the that everyone must see the latest trailer from Avatar.  Oh, joy now not only must I endure the over-hyped chatter about this movie, I can no longer escape random showings of this or any other video.  To be clear- I think this is a very cool technology but the social ripple of unintended consequences great. 

I already pontificated on this in an earlier post - I reprint it here.

When properly lit and shot on film, this makes for the best test of flesh tones one can find." -TW

It is indeed interesting what one finds whilst trolling manufactures websites – Yeah, I know I need to get out more.

3M has announced a functioning video projector designed to fit into a mobile device (Cell Phone, Blackberry, and Digital Camera).  The 3M site http://www.3m.com/mpro/index.html states the unit is

"Roughly the size of a wireless earpiece, and a half inch thick..."

can project an image of

"VGA 640x480 Resolution"

And - most interestingly or curiously

"Projects sizes 5' to 50' or more"

The 3M description markets this as a social tool for sharing photos and videos; I see the break mobile content providers have been looking for in particular the WiMax folks.  All those arguments against people watching content on their phones because the screen is too small just may have gone away. 

Taking a futurist POV, imagine a time when there are no 103" plasmas just your mobile content device which projects an HD image of up to 60" or 70".  Aside from a central sever for storing your terabytes of content you take it all with you. (that which you could not store on the mobile device could be accessed via a slingbox like connection) oh, and it can make phone calls as well.

While the techie in me gets all worked up about the above being possible and I am intent on finding system diagrams to figure out how this works, the luddite in me bemoans the loss of regionalization. With the advent of cable, Satellite TV and the Slingbox type devices we no longer allow ourselves a chance to see local programming. Often locals do not see local programming - aside from the 6:00 news. Accents are becoming homogenized, Story lines all the same. Instead we arrive at the hotel, set up our PC to connect to the Slingbox and watch all our shows including our local news-(not the local news of the place we are staying). I do have hope that IPTV and sites like YouTube will always provide an outlet for truly regional culture; does anyone know exactly what happened to the Manhattan accent you last saw in 40's movies?

There are a number of troublesome possibilities as well:

·       Those lovely folks who seem to think the rest of us are utterly fascinated with their lives and use their Nextel or speaker phone on trains have a new way to invade personal space.

·       The potential for showing images you would really not rather- or I'd rather not see.

The lure of showing something elicits in a public manner -even if just as a laugh- can be quite strong.

In the days of the first single gun LCD projectors a number of techs-(including me) and a projectionist stayed late putting a new unit through its paces. The company I worked for rented several floors which had windows on two side streets and the main ave. Initially we pointed the projector out one of the open windows facing a block long side street wall to see just how big an image the projector could actually produce.  The image was big and damn bright! As it grew later on an early summers day we became even more impressed as the video engineer tweaked a few things and was able to produce a super bright image of about 20' (remember the throw was just a Manhattan side street width).  The projectionist wondered aloud if this 'data' projector could moonlight as IMAG support - (IMAG commonly is the projected talking head of the on stage speaker).  Someone mentioned that it must be fairly inefficient in handling flesh tones. 

Here is where the title of this entry comes from. Our ever resourceful projectionist placed a tape in the SVO deck and hit play. Up before us leaped to life a 20' super bright image of a couple in flagrante delicto. Yeah, you read that right.  There in full color was a 20' porn playing. We laughed, snickered, and thanked our stars that this was an industrial area after 8 pm on a Tuesday night. Then we heard a Yelp, expletives and our desk phones started to ring.  It appears two senior management types had stayed late as well and were just at that moment crossing the side street when our impromptu show had started.  Suffice it to say, the next few days were a bit tense in the office. Those who know the story, who’s initial are credited to the quote and just why we had ready access to the content will completely understand why I still find it hilarious.

We were some high tech geeks with access to very pricey toys and took a moment to misuse it. It was a one off event unlikely to happen again for some time.  Now anyone with a penchant to cause a ruckus could do nearly the same but all from his \ her mobile device.

Considering the two leading specs quoted above from the 3M site. 

640x480 is just tolerable looking at a 5' image, any bigger and you lose all definition.  I see no way the "..up to and above 50' image" is plausible.

Original Post Link here: http://bit.ly/8O3Zov