iPocket: the pocket projector

For those of you old enough to remember, a really cool gadget that pre-dated PCs was the View-Master, a kind of handheld projector that could view reels, or pre-packaged slide sets, from different content creators, like movie makers, kid's programs and science content sources. It required no batteries and had a brain dead interface (just insert a reel, look into the View-Master and point towards a light source). Clicking the one and only button on the View-Master forwarded to the next slide in the reel.

Flash-forward to the present, and a brain-dead simple way that people often share digital photos is via USB pen drives. They fit in the pocket, and for under $30, you can carry around 1,000 average quality images with you. Not bad.

A thought occurred to me the other day; what if you could combine the pen drive with the View-Master? What I am thinking of is a pen drive-sized device that can store photos and other graphic files the same way as any USB based storage device (i.e., stick the drive in a computer's USB port and drag photos onto the drive). But, similar to the View-Master, this device, which I will euphemistically call the iPocket, would have a lighting source that could "project" images in the drive onto a wall or some other background.

To be clear, unlike the View-Master, which used an analog reel and shined light through it, the iPocket would need to take digital images and project them out of an analog interface. Conceptually similar to digital projectors, which run in the thousands of dollars and have specialized digital signal processors (DSPs) and other sophisticated componentry, but lack local storage and of course consume larger physical footprints, the iPocket would need to leverage ultra cheap components (I personally wouldn't pay more than $50 or so for such a device) and fit in a pocket-friendly form factor.

Such a device would be brain dead simple to use in that it would only need a forward and backward button, which also automatically turns the device on. Similarly, a more advanced version could feature a "share" option that allows one iPocket owner to share a photo with another iPocket owner simply by clicking share while pointing at the other iPocket. For technical simplicity, version one might be limited to projecting JPEG images, while later versions could support more sophisticated multimedia formats like MPEG movies.

Can it be done? Would you use it?