This reminds me of the original patents that Magic Leap had, which involved pumping light through a single optical fiber that was wiggled by piezoelectrics into a spiral to project light (https://kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning-dis...).

> The chip projected a roughly 125-micrometer image of the Mona Lisa.

This may seem small (barely visible as a dot to the naked eye), but that's also the geometric mean of the Planck length and the diameter of the observable universe. So average size actually.

I wonder if this has implications for custom home chips/prototyping. I'm sure a big issue is vibrations but something like this could remove the need for masks at least. (again, not my area so I am clobbering terminology I am sure). It may open up home fab capabilities.

What is this, a movie theater for ants?

It has to be at least 3 times bigger than this!

Actually the tricky part we ran into is optics scaling -- even 3x bigger doesn't help much if the projection angle stays fixed.

or AR glasses?

Sure, AR glasses. And when the MEMS mirror stiction-fails at 3am, have fun debugging that.

We can finally say yes to this question

This might be relevant for Augmented Reality headgear.

Seems like you could put a few of these on a contact lens and minimally get a small private HUD. Seems like with a few of them (or fast enough scanning speed) you could build effectively a light field to give it depth)

This is actually getting close enough to manipulate the _phase_ of light! And doing that would allow creating true holograms.

Or alternative true augmented reality glasses that are not limited to one focal plane.

Have I got news for you:

https://www.rp-photonics.com/phase_modulators.html

The gap between phase modulation and consumer holograms is mostly compute -- we tried routing real-time wavefront correction and it just melted everything downstream.

Electro-optic modulators already exist — still no StarTrek. :(

Sounds like this will have interesting fiber-optic implications?

Happy days at the ant colony.

How do you even fit a video projector onto something that small, the physics feel like they shouldn't cooperate.

Oh wait. It does have the correct title. My fruit flies are cheering.

Cool. Now I can show videos to my fruit flies! /s

Srsly title should be "MEMS Array Chip the Size of a Grain of Sand Can Project Video"

not

"MEMS Array Chip Can Project Video the Size of a Grain of Sand"

The ambiguity is a classic dangling modifier — the kind style guides flag specifically because it genuinely changes the meaning. Good catch.

It is actually about a 0.125mm projection, not the size of the chip. But more about steering lasers, which is really what they wanted to do.

This is revolutionary. No other way to put it.

It certainly looks like something that will find novel applications.

Has anyone tested coherence over distance? A 125-micrometer image now, but does resolution degrade nonlinearly as you scale projection distance up?