Pico Projector Solutions

Overview: Pico Projector

Pico Projectors offer OEMs an opportunity for increased value-add into their products, and allows devices like tablets and smartphones to become even more multi-functional. Users of pico projectors can enjoy this added feature, allowing them to display videos and images to a group, view a spreadsheet in a much larger size, or other uses.

According to the Pacific Media Associates 2011 Pico Projector Manufacturer Survey, the pico projector market is forecasted to grow from 2.8 million units in 2011 to over 58 million units in 2015. However, Pico Projectors still have significant technical challenges to adoption.

Challenges & Solutions: Pico Projector

Viewability

Along with size and cost, the biggest barrier that OEMs and system integrators face in adopting a pico projector into handheld devices like smartphones and tablets is projected content viewability, or what is known as ‘effective lumens’. Often the term brightness is incorrectly used here—projected content doesn’t have to be brighter to hasten adoption—rather, it has to be more viewable without negative side effects. The only solution to increase viewability, and thus effective lumens, so far has been to simply increase the projector’s light source wattage. While this creates a more viewable image due, it places increasingly higher power requirements on the already-taxed power environment of a handheld device. With pico projectors already consuming more than 1W of power when operational (by far the largest single consumer in the entire system), increasing power consumption is simply not possible.

QuickLogic’s VEE and VEE HD+ technologies provides the ideal solution by dynamically adapting projected content to the viewing environment, which results in an increase in effective lumens without an increase in light source wattage.

Color Correction

Traditional video projectors, such as those used in business conference rooms and movie theatres, always project onto a white screen. Professional content is always color-balanced for this, whether during the mastering or rendering process.

Picos are designed to be portable and be readily-used—and unintended consequence of this is that they are not always going to be projected onto a white surface. The consequence of this is that the color of the projected surface can significantly change how the content is perceived.

QuickLogic’s Background Color Compensator (BCC) technology uses advanced color balancing and enhancement to adapt the colors of the projected content to best match the projected surface