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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Right. Tiny projectors have been done before. Samsung had a smartphone with a projector back in 2014, but nobody wanted it. Some startup called Moviphone has announced a new one for 2027.[1] The use cases have not been compelling and fighting ambient lighting with a small projector is always tough.

Possible use case: projecting menus, ads, and bills on restaurant tables. With a camera and enough automated layout to work around what's on the table.

It might sell to the people who buy refrigerators with displays on the door. Could be useful as a cooking training aid, like cooking videos but present where you need them.

The light bulb form factor is cute but probably not that useful. Most of the light will be aimed in non-useful directions. Look into ultra short throw projectors.

[1] https://moviphones.com/

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It's a good thing that most inventors don't fall for the "something vaguely like this has been tried with inferior technology before, and it sucked" line of reasoning, or our world would look very different :)

Well, if you're a inventor, you look at the prior art to see if it's been done before. I hold six issued patents, two of which were very profitable. I had one patent rejected because I missed relevant prior art from 1948.

Here’s a WiFi lightbulb I made 20+ years ago. https://boingboing.net/2003/05/14/wifi-nightlight.html

Then again, I feel like I know industrial designers who play with building on ideas that came before, reexamining whether those ideas might have a fresh form and a place in the world today.

Who iterate and hone until they have something worth existing in today’s world—often doing do more publicly than corporations’ R&D departments—then let the patent technicalities be the well-paid lawyers’ problem…

Nothing truly new under the sun

Legal counsel at multiple companies have always advised me to not do a patent search before writing up an invention. I guess often the lawyers do the search, and the inventors don’t.

That said, this project isn’t well summarized as merely “tiny projectors”. Many patents have been granted for systems that include parts that are also patented. Indeed, I can see recently granted patents that include digital projectors. And many products have good sales without being patented; patents are not the end-all of invention. So I feel like you’ve been much too quick to dismiss.

> The light bulb form factor is cute but probably not that useful. Most of the light will be aimed in non-useful directions. Look into ultra short throw projectors.

gonna hard disagree! you aren't going to have 360° projector in there with wasted light going nowhere. you're going to have 1-4 steerable projectors. the "facade" as a globe bulb means you can place it at any direction you like depending on where the cord needs to go. for ceiling as well you don't want it to have a fixed throw direction. bulb makes perfect sense.

Imagine downvoting John effing Nagle. However my humble opinion is that sometimes revisiting, if not reinventing, the wheel is beneficial in light of accrued epistemic benefits (or for the fun of tinkering with a cutesy creation) . Not for patenting, of course. Besides, the bulb form-factor is not too different from cctv cam ceiling installations.

> Imagine downvoting John effing Nagle.

You’re not doing anyone any favors by replacing genuine feedback with sycophancy. That’s how you end up with Nobel disease and similar afflictions.

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