Every year someone announces that a giant flat screen TV to hang on
the wall is ‘just around the corner’. A recent European patent application
(581 377) from Philips of Eindhoven, gives a more realistic view. ‘The industry
is not even close to turning such dreams into reality,’ it says.
So Philips is patenting a stopgap. A video projector linked to a TV
output is built in the space between a false wall and the real wall at the
end of the living-room. The projector throws an image onto an angled mirror
which throws it forward onto an apparently ordinary framed picture hanging
on the false wall. Instead of a painting, the frame holds a translucent
back projection screen. So at a flick of a switch, the picture on the wall
becomes a flat TV screen. Philips has already built prototypes for demonstration
in the US.
