Teen invents pen-sized pico projector while your kid's busy beating up honor roll students
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted June 3rd 2009 2:47AM
posted June 3rd 2009 2:47AM
Life can sure be confusing for a teenager in this fast-paced techno-world we live in. Without the proper guidance, a kid could find himself unplugging someone's life support, or going to jail for borrowing the neighbor's WiFi. Hell, if old man General Tommy Franks (retired) has his way you won't even be able to hang out behind the Safeway and enjoy a six pack with your fellow juvenile delinquents without being tracked via GPS! So it warms our hearts when we do hear of a youngster that's bucked the odds and done something constructive. For example, a 13-year-old named David Baker has received a patent for his Light Beam Delivery System, a pico projector that fits in a pen casing, and works by combining three RGB lasers with an optics assembly that creates a light ray that is then shined through a rotating disk to the screen. "When the light goes through the lenses," he explains, "they take each light pixel and shine it onto a screen or wall. The lenses run back and forth until it fills the screen. This process repeats 30 times per second to make it appear as though you're looking at a solid image and not a series of pixels, and you have the image projected." And where did he find the inspiration for all of this? "I was sitting in church thinking about how to make projectors easier to handle and I just thought of it," he says. Here's to daydreaming during mass!
[Via About Projectors]
[Via About Projectors]
Patent number US 7,535,436 for those looking. The claims actually don't even mention that its a pen or has any explicit size or portability. I can't comment on the validity of the patent but being awarded a patent, having a valid patent and inventing can be and often are separate.
This is pretty much just like the Microvision projector system, except that it uses a disc full of little lenses (1 per scan line) instead of a MEMS scanning mirror. The only problem is that manufacturing the disc lens and aligning it will probably be harder than building and using the MEMS scanner.
And then he goes on to found Stark Technologies...
I think of so many things, every day, but i'm not easily satisfied with an idea, if its not a leap it's not good enough.
This looks ok, just CRT tech in a pen. But if it means encased moving things part, no thank you. Solid-state is the future.
John Logie Baird had the rotating wheel.
Actually, this is almost exactly how early generations of CRT television sets used to function. A rotating disc driven by motor and containing a number of holes in a spiral pattern getting progressively smaller toward the center was used to generate the beam sweep across the display phosphors until the task was later replaced by a system of magnets. It's not surprising this found it's way into the pico.
A smart company would jump on this right away and pay the kid the licensing fee regardless of the state of the patent just to use the novelty of a 13-year old inventor for marketing purposes.
I think you used to have to provide a working prototype to get a patent. Might be time to go back to that requirement.
The word 'invent" has been thrown around this comment several times. This kid has not invented anything. He conceptualized something. Having an idea and building a working prototype are vastly different things (as several people already mentioned before me).
In a couple of years when someone actually builds this thing and tries to market it, this kid will sue and there is the brilliance of it all. He used the patent system to fund his college and possibly post-graduate studies.
Smart kid though. I'll give him that.
@nikster: "And what did you do when you were 13?"
You're right. I invented a perpetual motion machine, but not until I was 16. I actually took the time to read the fact that *you can't patent a perpetual motion machine,* and read about how a bunch of historical shiesters ruined it for everyone else by patenting perpetual motion machines that didn't really work. Now you don't get my infinite energy generating device, and I know more about patent law than anyone you know, so suck on that with YOUR FACE!
The invention is NOT simply an MS PAINT sketch, as some commenters would have you believe. If you actually read the patent, you will find an enabling description of the invention. It is pretty thorough. Further, someone mentioned that no realistic power source will fit in the pen. However, the patent clearly mentions that the device will be powered through USB/Firewire or something similar. The invention does seem to be novel, non-obvious and useful. And this patent is much better than the IBM patents that we have been seeing lately.