Filed under: Macworld, Hardware
Macworld Expo: Microvision projector kicks up interest
It's not available for purchase yet, but the tiny Microvision Pico projector on display at Macworld Expo definitely made an impact. The device -- roughly the size and weight of an iPhone -- throws a clear and sharp WVGA (848x480) image across a table or a room onto any light-colored surface. With VGA and composite video inputs, it's a perfect match for portable media players of any sort, or road-warrior presentation needs for small audiences. Battery power is slated to last about 2 hours (90 minutes on the prototype) and it charges over USB. A laser-based projection technology creates images that never need focusing, regardless of the throw distance.
Microvision expects to ship the Pico device in the middle of 2009, with pricing not yet finalized ("at or under $500" is the expectation). We got a little bit of hands-on time in the video below. Note that the scan pattern visible when the projection is in frame is an artifact of the camera's scan rate -- the actual projected image looks great. You can also see some fascinating "unofficial" experiments using a Pico projector at the underground Pico blog.
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Since getting schooled in the comments on 
Over on #iphone-shell, user Doggkruse was wondering how to get pico to work on his iPhone. Problem was that the iPhone had no terminal definitions on-board. So every time he ran pico, he got "Unknown termtype vt100" errors. For those of you curious how to fix this problem, here's the solution. On your iPhone, create the folder /usr/share/terminfo/76 and copy /usr/share/terminfo/76/vt100 from your Mac over to the iPhone. Once there, set your term environment variable to vt100. In csh, this is set term=vt100. It varies, obviously, by shell. Once this is done, you should be able to use pico in normal full-screen mode. For those of you full-screen addicts, there's now vim and pico. For the rest of us, there's ed--the editor of kings. User DrunkDwarf was nice enough to put up a copy of vt100 for Windows users 
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