DIGILENS® - LASER LIGHT ENGINE (White Paper)

 

Virtuality Solutions Group have built the worlds first SPECKLE FREE, single panel 1080p LCoS FRONT PROJECTOR, completely solid state! 

Photographed here projecting on the laboratory wall, the colors are outstanding, with deep saturated reds that can only be experienced "live," since no video or picture can duplicate the image. With a simple solid state electro-optic solution now developed, SBG looks forward to low cost laser projectors.

Projection display developers have been eagerly anticipating lasers for many years. Extremely bright, reliable, efficient, compact and cost effective devices from laser diode suppliers like Mitsubishi, Novalux, SONY, Hitachi and QPC lasers, are expected to revolutionize a market that for the past twenty years has been dominated by incoherent source lit DLP and 3LCD projector designs. True life-like color images are only possible with lasers, which provide color gamuts covering 90% of what the eye actually sees, surpassing by far LEDs and other incoherent sources. However, lasers bring an unwelcome guest to the party: SPECKLE. Easily recognizable as a sparkly or granular structure around uniformly illuminated rough surfaces, speckle arises from the high spatial and temporal coherence of lasers. The resulting viewer distraction and loss of image sharpness has been the major obstacle to commercialization of laser projectors. Although methods of eliminating speckle have been proposed since the first demonstrations of lasers, until now an efficient and elegant solution has proved elusive. Mechanical methods such as rotating diffusers and vibrating screens suffer from the problems of noise, mechanical complexity and size. Other passive techniques using diffractive, MEMS or holographic elements, micro lens arrays and others have met with limited success.

Very recently, SBG has made major breakthroughs in understanding the phenomenon of speckle in laser displays and has used this insight to develop a radically new approach to speckle reduction based on its Switchable Bragg Grating (SBG) technology. The resulting Digilens® - Laser Light Engine Module (very large version pictured here) is compact, scalable size, cheap, silent, easily integrated, and applicable to any type of laser display. As an added bonus the SBG solution also provides the functions of beam combining, beam shaping and homogenization all integrated in a single glass module.

Lasers are coming to market in 2009 in all categories of projection displays, and particularly compact devices where lasers will open the door to ultra low form factor designs with long battery life.

Download Laser Light Engine White Paper