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Followup: from This it appears that MVS is now (always was?) using a MEMS scanner - basically a DLP. So I think I'll stand corrected. :) But this also makes me wonder if the topic of this thread is going to have to deal with the MVS patent portfolio.

It seems to me the problem is a safe, small, retina projector. If you want to project something properly, anywhere in your field of view, it seems like it's exactly what you need.

This company makes something like the kind of technology you need for that but is currently putting it in cellphones and the nicer picoprojectors you see... http://www.microvision.com/technology/index.html

All the processing power, sensors (multi-axis accel's, cameras, etc), are entirely doable.. demonstrated by all the augmented reality apps that do this stuff on your cellphone already. Now we just need the displays that don't suck. ;)

I guess Brother also developed this and didn't turn it into a product. I suspect that's what Google is looking to take mainstream with Project Glass... though I haven't see the things in person. Looking through a little bit of glass just doesn't accomplish what they're pimping so far.

Well Laser-based projectors (like MicroVision's Showwx+) don't require a flat surface, nor any focusing at all (laser light being coherent and all).

But they still fail in the brightness department (although they already do have much better brightness that LED-based microprojectors) (and this will probably continue to improve easily as the laser technologies improves over time. The hard part in such projectors is the scanning system. Once that technology has been developed, it's just trivial to pick whatever is the latest best compromise point in the ouput-power/price/form-factor/battery-drain equilibrium).

For Keyboard, the 4-part foldable like Stowaway made popular during the Palm / PDA era are IMHO still the best thing at that level of mobility. And the Bluetooth powered ones can still be used with modern hardware.

That is only true if you need a PHYSCAL keyboard and display. A small brick the size of a Iphone, with a Laser Keyboard http://www.virtual-laser-keyboard.com/ and Pico Display http://www.microvision.com/pico_projector_displays/ would allow for multiple options. I agree that a non-tactile keyboard is not the best, but for light web surfing/email it would work. It would have 3 modes.
1. An Iphone like slate, with a on a screen (3.5" built in physical screen) keyboard, when there are not a convenient surface.
2. A projection keyboard and display
3. At home/work where you need a full keyboard and a high quality display with a wireless link to both.
I leave getting that into a iphone size for a reasonable amount of money up to the engineers.

http://www.microvision.com/ has been doing this for years with their Nomad displays.

http://www.microvision.com/

They're also using the same technology for pocket and integrated projectors.

I see the Nikon is going to use an LED projector, but one other interesting solution is laser-based projectors, which this website claims are always in focus:

http://www.microvision.com/showwx/experience.html

I would expect them to have better contrast too.

Is this $200 no-bulb projector real or fake?
http://www.microvision.com/showwx/vote.html

http://www.microvision.com/

Check the Buzz section of the site: So much for your vaporware...

I went to http://www.microvision.com/ and it seemed to me to be a bunch of photo shopped pictures with promises of working with manufactures maybe, sometime in the future to make things kinda like the ones they were talking about. Vaporware.

my hopes lie here - hopefully HD in the release... http://www.microvision.com/pico_projector_displays/

So most likely Optium will now command the market, and the Laser projector will suffer the same fate as Betamax/Laser disk.

Well, it might not either - DLP is later technology than LCD, but both persist, and I'd even say DLP is gaining in projector fields.

The LED device is around the size of a wallet. The laser one prototype was the size of one of those small matchboxes. Going by this website, they've gotten that down to a penny. Going by Microvision's own site, they're looking to integrate the laser technology into a cell phone. If it can be made cheap, durable, and effective enough, it'll be able to carve it's own niche easily enough.

You're remembering the PicoP from Microvision, which is the only "pico projector" that will use lasers http://www.microvision.com/pico_projector_displays/howitworks.html . Everything else is just a small DLP.

Real nerds support Microvision's projector because they want virtual retinal displays.

Here's the company site. No mention of battery life issues.

This thing is a one-pixel display being scanned in 2D by a MEMS mirror. One pixel scanned displays have been tried before, and they're usually annoying. One of the neat things about LCD displays, plasma panels, and TI DLP mirror systems is that there's no flicker at all, because the display has full persistence. This brings back flicker, big time; all the persistence is in the eye. This idea has been tried before, in bigger displays, and abandoned. So this isn't going to look great, but it will have niche uses.

Brightness is 10 lumens, incidentally.

Already exists:
  http://www.microvision.com/

adding a projector into the phone...

as described by Microvision's statement that they are in talks with a major company. Could you imagine a phone with a projector? I sure could... and I want one.

Microvision seem to have faked the videos of the Picop in action, which is a bit of a poor show (http://www.microvision.com/video/elevator.wmv?autoplay=1 or http://www.microvision.com/video/soccer.wmv?autoplay=1). The projection probably looks very washed out in well lit environments, so they decided to fake it instead. I'm sure it looks good in the dark though. The only issue I can think of is laser speckle, but I've never seen a laser projector in action, so I don't know how bad the effect is going to be.

Another player is http://www.lightblueoptics.com/>LightBlueOptics who are using a clever scheme where they are bouncing the lasers off of a Fourier transform of the desired image. Laser speckle may be an issue with this system too. These things are obviously going to have to be cheap if they are going to be for mobile phones, which suggests that slightly beefed up versions for home cinema should be pretty cheap as well.

The Microvision website has a pdf with specifications. 10 lumens on this one as well . . . seemed like something neat before I read that. Now, not so much.

Is that the Microvision (http://www.microvision.com/) technology? If it is, that might finally be the first step towards VRD displays for mobile phones/laptops... and I can't wait to get rid of the monitors, they suck as a technology.

I first heard about them 10 years ago, when they made the first VRD display (the thing which projects picture directly on the eye). The thing is available, but relatively expensive, and I think they mostly sold it to military. Then I heard about this mobile-phone-projector thingie, which uses the same technology. I hope the next step is cheaper weareable VRD display...

Link to the developer's site: http://www.microvision.com/pico_projector_displays/standalone.html

Looks like they're pitching this as an accessory for mobile phones as well as mini stand-alone projos.

A whole new world of mobile phone-related road accidents beckon...

More positively, I've tried some cars with head-up displays, and they really work. Now if you had a GPS-enabled phone that could project driving instructions onto the screen in front of you...now, that would be cool. Trouble is, you'd probably end up being tempted to open another window and 'just try and do a couple of mails' whilst waiting for the green light.

http://microvision.com/proj.html

Everyone's complaining about the resolution, so can we just swap displays?

Looking at Lumus-Optical's web site, it's clear that all they've done is fold the optics and are using a segmented beamsplitter embedded in an optically clear substrate to display the image on your glasses. Nothing new, just a slight twist on the low-obscurement transparent HMD designs. If you wear glasses, I see absolutely nothing keeping you from just moving the mounting bracket over to your own frames.

For what it's worth, you can buy similar microdisplays and electronics directly from Kopin ( http://www.kopin.com/commercial-display-products/ ). This can also enlighten you to the "cost" of those XGA head mounted displays. They're still not cheap, but they're also traditional active-matrix LCDs. It would probably be simple for the company to upgrade resolution, but the price is going to skyrocket, too.

I'd be FAR more impressed if they were using an RGB 2d MEMS scanner from Microvision ( http://www.microvision.com/ ). I actually believe that that a similar technology but using a segmented prism instead was to be used in ultra-flat rear projection TV's as an alternative.

Also, as far as I'm aware, only 3D Visor ( http://www.3dvisor.com/ ) is currently using OLEDs in a commercial product, but their work is with standard enclosed nausea inducing stuff. There are rumors flying of a $1000 XGA product sometime in the near future, though.

...this is not anything new. Microvision has been working on a similar technology for some time now:

http://www.microvision.com/proj.html

Can't say whether it'll come out of the R&D phase or not, but the "mini-projector in a cell phone" is not groundbreaking.

Microvision http://microvision.com/ has been working to bring MEMs projectors to market for several years for personal and heads up display uses. They have had a single color wearable display on the market for years using this technology for specialized display purposes (military and maintance technicians). Disclosure: I do own stock in microvision, so take the above with a large grain of salt....

This sounds similar to the Microvision PicoProjector. http://microvision.com/proj.html

Microvision is the only company with technology to make something like this work. Placing small screens inside the glasses puts huge limitations on the resolution of the image. Painting the image directly onto the retina with a tiny low-powered laser solves that, producing a "virtual" image of arbitrarily large resolution without having a screen at all.

Microvision (http://microvision.com/) make virtual retinal display's. The full color version is currently only for military use, mainly because it's big, heavy and expensive. They're currently making new versions with MEMS that hopefully will hit the consumer market in 3-5 years.

Right here: http://www.microvision.com./

It's not quite what was elaborated upon in SnowCrash, but it's getting there.

It's been done already, used as a fancy toy for the military, or as a neat tool by the motor industry (look at a car engine and see instant annotation overlays).

Imagine a pair of sunglasses that overlay details of the car engine you're looking at or map notes as you travel around town.

Imagine? The stuff already exists... Called the Nomad Expert System ( a type of Virtual Retina Display)Albeit kind of expensive and not exactly in sunglass form factor, but really close.

http://www.microvision.com/nomadexpert/index.html

a better display method, perhaps holographic

I'm still holding out for a Microvision PDA/cell phone. Alas, it may be a few years more.

1. VR is expensive
2. Most people don't currently NEED VR, so compelling applications (outside of a few small domains) are somewhat rare. This will change over time.

There's of course a lot more to it than just that, but that is the basic problem. I've seen all sorts of programs that people would find interesting to run at home, but not vital to run at home. It currently isn't worth the cost for most people (anywhere from $5k for bargain basement stereo vision with poor tracking, to $1 million+ for a cave + haptic/robotic interfaces). People won't use VR until it is (a) unobtrusive, (b) cheap, and (c) intuitive.

On the 3D display end, VR needs to move from large space filling displays like caves to small setups like a small pair of glasses (current top end devices from manufacturers such as MicroOptical and Microvision give a glimpse at possible avenues forward). Ideally, these glasses should still let you see the real world (referred to as augmented reality, rather than virtual reality). This is far less disorienting for many people. There are also technical problems with HMDs (head mounted displays) aside from size and weight. The best HMD resolutions today are generally about 1280x1024, and the field of view often isn't stellar. For many people, these displays can cause headaches. The closer a display is to the eyes, the higher res it needs to be in order to avoid ill physiological effects. Then, the VR applications themselves need to run fast enough to have very little lag (ideally less than 12 ms between a user's action, and the application visually responding). If the lag gets too large, many people begin to get motion sickness (this is potentially a huge barrier for many people w/ VR). One alternative to VR glasses is projected displays, but without some additional engineering & mass production, these displays are not likely to be very cheap in the near future (and these displays still require some type of glasses, either shuttered glasses, or polarized glasses). The final visual alternative (ignoring fancy and expensive volumetric displays) are auto-stereoscopic displays, which work w/o special glasses. These displays have the downside though of requiring the user to sit/stand in a precise location in order to get the 3D effect.

Motion tracking also needs to get significantly better. Current motion tracking techniques (for gesture recognition, head tracking, etc.) are generally quite bulky and expensive. Some image processing techniques using video cameras show promise for cheap compact systems. Large scale motion tracking and registration (i.e. matching your position and orientation precisely with a map and models) is a much bigger problem for outdoor situations. GPS is one of the better ways right now, and that is abysmal (GPS gives positional accuracy to within a few meters, and no clues about orientation. VR apps require position to within a few centimeters usually, and orientation to within a degree or two). There is a fair amount of research into improving this, but it will likely be several years before any non-miliary applications emerge.

Finally, once VR is cheap enough (less than $2K USD for 3D vision and tracking), and small enough (i.e. a small/light pair of glasses, and at most a few stationary webcam sized cameras, or a single 3D projector), then average people can start to think about using VR. Even then, people won't use it until there are compelling applications. The first big applications will of course be games, but outside of 3D modeling, medical data, scientific data, psychology and geology there have been few compelling uses shown. Clearly there are a lot of compelling applications just waiting to be developed, but until VR becomes cheaper, smaller and more intuitive, these will most likely not be developed.

You can buy them in the US right now. Microvision makes them. They're pretty expensive though.

Okay, just a few things about this and some problems.

Microvision is the company doing this.

What about saccades? When the eye moves rapidly over a long angular direction (which it does in tracking objects or changing your view) or a short angular direction (a.k.a. microsaccades, which happen multiple times a second), you get blurring which is normally suppressed by the visual attention system.

When you do saccades across long persistence displays like LCDs, you will not see any major aberration as the light source effectively stays on. When you saccade across medium to short persistence displays (P21 phosphors for short, your regular TV or CRT for medium), it is possible to notice that there is either a shearing or tearing artifact.

TV/CRT displays are scanned left-to-right at (say for 640x480 VGA at 80 Hz) 480*80=38400 times per second and scanned slow...ly up-to-down 80 times per second followed by that quick scan back up. Well you can try this at home (TV's at ~60 Hz show this a little more easily than most of our CRTs which are set at a less-likely-to-appear to flicker refresh of >80Hz):

look at an object to the left of the TV screen. Then rapidly switch what you're looking at to the right side of the TV screen. The image of the TV will no longer look rectangular but like a shortened-horizontally and sheared (top to the leftish, bottom to the rightish) parallelogram. If you do a right-to-left saccade, the image will appear longer horizontally and top to the rightish of the bottom.

Now the interesting thing happens with up-to-down saccades: if you go up-to-down at slower than or close to the same angular velocity as the scan line (depends on how close you're sitting to the screen) goes down the screen, the projected image will appear SHORTER-UP-TO-DOWN and if you actually match the scan-line's downward angular velocity, the TV image will seem to just be a poorly set up XF86 display of one pixel in height.

If you have an effectively ZERO-PERSISTENCE direct write display, since the laser is being used to draw directly on the retina (or to project on a screen) rather than an electron-train hitting chemicals causing them to phosphoresce with a certain limited time before they stop glowing (PERSISTENCE...), then fixation has to be maintained or the illusion of motion based on the projection's position is destroyed. Laser projection systems try do multiple lines scanned at once or other fancy projection scan patterns rather than the usual cathode-ray-gun approach, but the saccade problem continues to be an issue.

The saccade errors are the big to-do with projective laser displays for visible wavelengths, regardless of whether they are projected onto a screen or direct write onto the retina.

The other problem is ... bah, it's enough already.

These guys have been at it for quite awhile with some nice results.

Microvision has this as a product called the nomad http://microvision.com/nomadexpert/index.html
The only lacking thing is that it's red monichrome.

They should NEVER use laser in the same sentence with retina.

making it HUGGE (PDA phones? urg)

Hey..if they can make a Wireless phone/PDA/digicam/mp3 player that is the formfactor of my small Samsung flip phone, w/ a screen that somehow folds out to be the size of an Ipaq, a 3-4 megapixel cam, w/ a good DAC and mp3 decoding chipset...and also have very good battery life, doesn't weight a ton..I'd buy it...

They're really close. Samsung sph-i500 is a Wireless phone/PDA/digicam/mp3 player. Runs PalmOS and has an SDIO slot. By the time it's actually available in the USA (lazy-ass Sprint -- grrrr), multi-GB SD cards should be cheap, so it should be comparable to the Flash-based MP3 players. As other posters note, the camera quality will still be lame, but it's great to have a camera with you 24x7.

That leaves a better screen. I don't see a fold-out screen coming any time soon. I'd rather have a cyborg-style floating "eyepiece" display, but Microvision has promised one for over a decade.

you mean microvision? the company mentioned in the article???

from microvision's website somewhere
"Headquarters for both Microvision and Lumera are in Bothell, Washington, a Seattle suburb."

Hey, this has already been doing this for years.

Pretty cool, but I wish they would do tricolor lasers and then blast full color into they eye. Power might be an issue... ah, retina over easy?

...called the Spectrum. 24 bit svga 800*600, configurable as a stereoscopic binocular display. Sounds like quake through this thing would be incredible.