REHOVOT, Israel — Israel-based Mirage Innovations has developed a lightweight, compact and affordable personal video display device for use with portable media players, game consoles, cellular phones and PDAs.

Mirage claims its NanoPrism technology will alter the rice/performance of personal displays while solving the problems plaguing traditional personal displays, which include unacceptably large weight and form factor.

The company's technology is based on the principle of transforming a thin transparent plate into a complete wearable personal display system. The diffractive planar optics is combined with a microdisplay source, such as micro LCD, LCOS or OLED, to provide the users with a color video image equivalent to a 40-in. screen viewed from a distance of 7 feet.

Within the NanoPrism diffractive planar optics device, light emerging from the microdisplay source is collected by a lens and coupled into a thin transparent substrate via a nanoscale diffraction grating. The trapped light propagates within the substrate by internal reflection toward the viewer's eyes, producing a perfectly aligned image.

"Our aim is to provide a solution to meet the need for future alternative portable display systems," said Tal Cohen, CEO of Mirage Innovations. "The demand for media-capable portable devices is being fuelled by the enormous increase in content for mobileTV and Personal Media Players, which has become available only in the last couple of years."

Last September, the company raised $7.5 million in a Series A round of financing from Israeli venture capital funds Gemini and Landa Ventures-- and the U.S. fund Benchmark Capital.