There has been a lot of pressure for companies to come up with a projector small enough to be put into mobile devices, but effective enough to be worthwhile. 3M has fired the latest shot in that battle with their new mobile projection engine. It’s about the size of a wireless earpiece, and it is less than half an inch think, but it uses LED illumination to deliver VGA resolution images.

Those images can project an image of 40 inches or larger. If a get a phone with one of those projectors in it I may just throw out my TV because it’s nowhere near that big. Though there are no details of which companies, 3M is shipping the projectors to their partners now, and those partners should be shipping products incorporating the projector early in the year. At the right price, and if it works as well as it sounds, this could be unbelievably huge.