Psychic Projectors.

Research is currently being done at Cornell and Stanford Universities to develop the world’s first psychic projector. The end goal is a complex digital camera/ projector combination that is able to read the backside of surfaces. For example, the researchers have started with the classic psychic game of “guess my card�. They have been able to develop a camera that is able to scan reflective surfaces for even the faintest reflections of light.

So, in the example of the playing card, the camera would pick up the reflected light that the card is bouncing onto say a book, or a face or any surface that the card is pointing towards. The camera would then take the information and transmit it into the projector and the projector would spit out an image of the backside of the card. The idea sounds fairly simple in practice, but researchers are saying that it will take up to 5 years to develop a system that works flawlessly every time.

The camera/ projector system, which uses an NEC MT1050 projector with a regular 200W UHP projector lamp, is setup so that it must transmit information to the projector one pixel at a time. Researchers at Cornell said that the first problem they ran into was the sheer number of pixels the camera was having to process and transmit, somewhere in the range of 740,342 pixels. They said that this was a huge problem because it was taking the unit a numbers of days to eventually project the image onto the screen. The students fixed this problem by cutting the reflective light from the card into quadrants and then using complex algorithms to program the camera to pick up only the most relevant bits of pixel information. They eventually cut their response time down to ten minutes.

Although this idea sounds fun and kind of quirky, I am not sure how practical it will be in the sane, safe confines of the world, outside of academia. I mean seriously, what in the world will people need a camera/ projector that reads the backsides of surface for? I can’t think of one use for it, unless this technology becomes so powerful that it can reproduce an image of a room from just the light information it is receiving from under the room’s closed door - now that would be interesting and something to write about!

Until next – keeping buying your projector lamps from myprojectorlamps.com