Today, MicroVision announced the establishment of a new global research and development center at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore.

We often receive emails and social media messages asking “what is the best pico projector?”.  That is an impossible question to answer.  Let’s reconstruct that question instead to “what is the best pico projector for me?”  That helps a bit.  But, with the multitude of products and technologies available, it is still a daunting task.  Nonetheless, we’ll see if we can make your decision a little easier.

In a  recent article, Pacific Media Associates (PMA) reported that sales of pico projectors grew 125% year-over-year in Q3 2010 (over 100,000 units for the quarter).  About 51% of those shipments were for products powered by Texas Instruments DLP® technology.  Similarly, iSuppli published a report predicting growth to over 7.3 million units by 2013 (CAGR of 258% from 2008).  Capturing just a small piece of this market could mean big revenue for display engine developers, such as 3M, Aaxa Technologies, and MicroVision, as well as Texas Instruments, who has taken the early lead.

We were recently contacted by Chips etc., who collect vintage electronics components.  Among their collection of Intel microprocessors and Panasonic vacuum tubes is one of the original MEMS scanning mirror assemblies from MicroVision.

Today, the USPTO issued patent number 7,901,084 assigned to MicroVision simply
titled, "Image projector with display modes".  The inventors describe
the invention as such:

Today, MicroVision unveiled its corporate strategy for 2011.  At a high level, the company is focused on three key objectives.  Specifically, they will:

Since the NionCom™ announcement regarding the introduction of the MemoryKick™ Vision™ tablet, we have received a lot of questions from our readers.  We’ve highlighted Anthony Link, CEO of NionCom™, and Richard Parri and Logan Chittenden, co-founders of ImageAMMO™ on Picopros before.  Michael Seo is likely a new name for our readers.  However, Mr. Seo brings with him vast experience in creative product design and manufacturing, as well as important business ties, as you will soon see.  And, it is important that our readers know who he is and what his vision is for the company.

We wanted to take a moment to highlight a nice application for apple devices like iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad running iOS 4.0 or later.  It is called PicoSnap by Slikc and is free on iTunes.

Today, NionCom announces the official introduction of the MemoryKick™ Vision™ tablet, a device for media management, business productivity, and gaming applications. The Vision™ tablet is an extension of the MicroVision Arrow™ mini-tablet shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early-January. They both share many components and features. We have discussed the Arrow™ mini-tablet on a few occasions on Picopros.com.

On January 20th, 2011 patent application 20110013097 assigned to MicroVision titled, "Correcting Scanned Projector Distortion by Varying the Scan Amplitude.  This patent application teaches method for improving a projected image by manipulating how the mirror scans the image.  Issues such as "keystone distortion, parallelogram distortion, pincushion distortion, barrel distortion, surface profile distortion, surface relief distortion, intentional distortion, or arbitrary distortion, or combinations thereof" can all be addressed using this approach.