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Bluetooth video - clip onto your spectacles!

How big is the display on your smartphone? Too small? How about getting one much, much smaller, then?

The conflict between needing a really big display and needing a really compact phone may be over. The MicroOptical corporation is currently demonstrating a Bluetooth display which clips onto your spectacles (yes, you do need to get plain lens ones if your eyes are perfect!) and feeds the output of your PDA of phone straight to you.

You will see, says the company, a quarter-screen VGA display - roughly the amount of data most PDAs show - floating in the air in front of you, the way a pilot sees a head-up display floating in the wind-shield.

The DV-1 digital viewer is in colour, and if you make your way to booth 645 at this week's Society for Information Display Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, you can try one out.

The DV-1 viewer, which will be available to application providers and systems integrators in mid-June as a developer's kit, offers wireless, hands-free and head-up viewing of electronic devices.

To quote from the press release: "The DV-1 viewer is MicroOptical's first digital wireless eyewear viewer," said Mark Spitzer, CEO of MicroOptical. "The 12-bit qVGA colour display, which is capable of handling both bit map and text input shows images from compatible PDAs and PCs via Bluetooth short-range wireless."

The MicroOptical developer's kit includes a protocol for transmitting images over a Bluetooth serial link. A driver is used in the transmitting device to send the serialized image to the DV-1 viewer, which in turn receives the output signal from the Bluetooth-enabled electronic device and projects images through a patented optical system that allows the user to maintain natural vision and awareness of the environment. The monocular viewer, which clips on to either side of eyeglasses, gives the user the impression of a free-floating monitor. The DV-1 viewer is battery powered and readable in all lighting conditions.

For more information, visit www.microoptical.net.