Microvision Delivers

Microvision has supposedly delivered today. The fruit is the long awaited IPM or Integrated Photonics Module. Making the long story short, IPM is a tiny multimedia projector. By using lasers as a source of light, it marks a very significant milestone on the road of image projection technology. First, it gets rid of Edison - style light bulb. We all know how inefficient light bulbs are in converting energy into light. Most of the energy supplied to a bulb is converted into heat. That is why image projectors draw a lot of power, get hot and noisy (they need fans to blow the heat out). Microvision IPM uses lasers. You probably have or at least have played with a pocket laser pointer. It runs for months on a set of tiny batteries and has a range of half a mile or more. Compare that to even the most powerful Maglite torch - they are big, heavy and can only dream to have a comparable range. Then using lasers you can get rid of another heavy and bulky part - optics. The IPM does not have any lenses. The laser light is coherent, it does need any optics to help it focus. It is focused all the time.

So how do they do it? How does it work? Almost identical to the old tube - style TV set. They have a beam of light (actually three beams - red, green and blue) and they can steer it left, right, up and down. The same way the old style TV sets used to work, except TVs were shooting an electron beam onto the fluorescent screen and IPM shoots light onto any surface serving as a screen. The heart of the IPM is a mechanical microchip, a so-called MEMS device, a tiny, fast moving micro-mirror, reflecting the lasers into any precisely selected point. And what is the most important, by getting rid of a bulb and optics, Microvision has been able to reduce an image projector to the size of a candy, making it possible to embed it inside a mobile phone or a device like a video iPod, no to to mention a notebook computer. The power consumption makes it possible to integrate with a portable device and run on batteries at least for a few hours.

The Holy Grail of display technology? Possibly, but this is just a prototype. We (at least myself) still do not know much about the image quality, the yield rates of the microchip (this will almost directly translate into price). We even don't know if the company will be able to productize the IPM prototype. I have been following Microvision (MVIS) for awhile. They had a lot of internal problems. An innovative, VC - founded startup, with great vision and roadmap, but just going too broad, burning money too fast and unable to deliver market versions of any of its gems. Things have changed not long ago. They got a new CEO (Alex Tokman), who sounds like a right person to do the job. Tokman is definitely not a movie star, but he seems to be doing one thing extremely crucial to the likes of Microvision - FOCUS. Instead of going wide, he axed many side projects and regrouped the company to focus and deliver. Not many but just a few products, the IPM being the most important. I love a strategy like that. Do not try to do everything. Just focus on your strengths and deliver. The customers, the investors, the partners, they will love you. The competition will hate you (they would love you to spread wide and thin!). Looking at the MVIS stock, it is quite probable 2007 will be the year of Microvision. But remember the company has still a long way to go. From prototype to large scale production. From trade shows to signing real contracts. And they will have to win the consumer acceptance. I am going to refrain from predicting MVIS to be a quick and safe money (my public track record for 2006 is not that great, although I still very much believe in QUIK story, buying on the dips). But hey, can you find other companies with such potentially breakthrough technologies?