Comment by reactordev
16 hours ago
Yes but one could argue the frame refresh/redraw cycle of a laser projector or lcd projector is the same at slow speed. It’s not just one giant ball of light. It goes through a process and the frame itself has to redraw.
Sure, the image doesn't come from nowhere. In this case, it's a wiggly piezo pushed raster scan with the light source varied to, ideally, match the frame contents for any raster position.
But the "projection" is only to the end of the waveguide, which makes a real image, which could then be protected onto a real surface. It would be as misleading as saying a CRT screen projects an image. Well, not really. A CRT screen uses electron beam projection in the image generation. After that image is generated, it can then be projected.
A scanning beam laser projector can, by all definitions (including that pesky dictionary), project an image as part of the generation. An LCD, a CRT, and this, cannot project an image without additional projection optics attached to it to throw that generated real image.
I understand what they did (very neat), I'm just complaining about the press release wording. And then there's this shoved at the bottom "Because the chip can project so many more spots in any given time interval than any previous beam scanners, it could also be used to control many more qubits in quantum computers". Might as well throw "AI" in there. Or, maybe I'm just confused about it all because I stupidly read a university backed press release.