Fancy playing mobile games through a projector?

Over on our sister site PocketPicks, we’ve been following the evolution of mobile projectors (or ‘pico’ projectors, as they’re becoming known) for quite some time. The notion keeps cropping up as new handset features, external units and hardware rumours, and it’s a firm favourite feature of practically every new concept phone.

But MobileGamesBlog has been chewing the fat with pico projector expert Gert Meyer about the feasibility of projecting your mobile phone image. There's quite a number of inherent flaws in the system, however, that put a bit of a downer on the whole concept.

Image quality isn’t a particularly big one, as we’re used to low resolution pictures anyway, but high levels of ambient light could obviously be an issue when it washes out the low-powered projection.

Using it on the train or bus is also a bit tricky, due to the constant movement and lack of a plain, flat surface to project onto.

And as games get fancier, with features such as landscape gaming (which could mean your hand is covering the projector) and motion sensitive controls (requiring you to wave the phone around), maintaining a steady picture would be prohibitively difficult.

For that matter, simply jabbing the keypad buttons could be enough to jostle your big screen image around far too much.

But the potential is undeniably inspiring. After playing incredible games like Zombie Infection recently, the notion of blowing that image up on the living room wall and really getting into the action, blood and guts is massively appealing.

Meyer suggests that a discrete pico projector unit is a better solution, as it’d reduce the drain on the handset’s battery and allow you to position it in a more stable location.

It’s an intriguing concept, and one that seems to have really captured the imagination of the mobile phone manufacturers. If game developers decide to get in on this notion, mobile gaming could soon be taken into a whole new dimension.