Laurie van Someren, Aleph One's founder and managing director, says there is an interest in wearable computers but the market is being held back by the high price of spectacle-mounted displays - around $5,000 for a VGA (640 by 480 pixel) screen.
Commercial services can provide relatively rapid satellite images on demand, a number of them taking pictures down to a resolution of 50cm (ie, 50cm x 50cm per pixel, the legal limit in America for commercial satellites, although military ones can peer closer).
The screen width was reduced to maintain the 16:9 aspect ratio of HDTV, with its 1,920 by 1,080 pixel count.
With each frame of the film containing 8.6m pixels, and each pixel having 24 bits of colour information, the resulting video file would comprise a whopping 5.6 terabytes of data.
By grouping these shuttered filters in threes, one of each colour, an individual picture element, or pixel, is created.
The pixels are then built into displays by embedding them and their electrical connections in a sheet of another polymer, this time a transparent and flexible one.By applying a voltage across the electrodes of a pixel, the polymer can be made to absorb or expel some of the electrolyte and thus expand or contract.
The whole pixel can thus be tuned to reflect any desired colour.That alone would make Opalux's technology worth considering for displays in general.
Another benefit is that a camera with an X3 sensor does not need to waste time and energy carrying out the interpolation a process that typically requires 100 calculations per pixel.
To produce a colour image, a carefully designed mosaic of red, green and blue filters is positioned over the sensor array, so that 50% of the pixels are covered by a green filter, 25% by a red filter, and 25% by a blue filter.Each pixel thus "sees" in only one colour.
That may not sound much, but Mr Lau points out that it actually has 3.9m sensors, so that it comfortably outperforms a conventional 2.0-megapixel sensor.Foveon may find selling its products on the basis of quality, rather than raw pixel count, a marketing challenge.
The problem of spectral spread is dealt with by the arrangement of the rods in a pixel, in order to make their individual outputs combine, in a process known as far-field diffractive coupling, to form intense, vivid colours.Dr Olson claims the technology is compatible with existing manufacturing techniques and materials, making its industrialisation easy.
