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Retinal Scanning Displays
Logic Bomb writes "The New York Times has an article covering new advances in the field of display systems that beam images directly onto the retina. An actual useable product has been developed that allows you to see a "projected" image without necessarily interfering with the rest of your vision. It sounds like a great way to watch TV or read news headlines on the bus if you ask me, but the article discusses some more, um, useful applications. )"
When you have a microLCD in your glasses, you're simulating a larger screen at a greater distance. If you want to look at the top left corner of the screen, you move your eye to look at the top left corner. If you want to look at text inthe center, you look to the center.
If you have something scanning directly on to your retina, and you move your retina (to look at part of the image that's not immediately in the center of view) doe the entire image move with it? On what is the scanner mounted? Does it know where your eye is looking, and update the field of view accordingly?
In short, an 800x600 resolution is pretty meaningless because all the image that's being projected outside of the fovea (very center, detail-oriented part of the retina) can't be attended to at the level of resolution the image provides.
The article gives no info, but I'd like to know how the image updates in response to eye saccades from place to place, and/or head movements.
I remember seeing a prototype retinal scanning display that Tom Furness and his team had developed at the Virtual Cockpit project for the air force in Dayton. This was almost 10 years ago when he packed up the project and moved it to the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology lab in Seattle. At the time it was bulky but it looked real and ready for refinement. Yet it is still under development and not really here -- not even for the military, who tend to be early adopters of this kind of tech when it's expensive and clunky. So how soon will this *realistically* take to appear in the real world?
(Anybody remember the IBM commercial where the guy on the park bench is jerking around like some kind of Tourette's sufferer -- until they zoom in and we see he's using a wearable to day trade? It's already getting hard to tell the crazy people from the people who are just using cell phones with headsets. How much worse is it going to get with things like this?)
Once this thing hits the consumer market, how long do you think it'll be before we start living with constant advertising in the corner of our FOV. Ugh...
Actually, you're eye does have three different color receptors. Namely red, green, and blue (actually, cyan, magenta, and yellow, which are the subtractive compliments). That is the reason we use RGB screens. For example, red and green light together trick our eye into perceiving the same color as yellow light, even though the wavelength of yellow light cannot be created through any combination of red and green light (physically). RGB screens are a direct result of the biology of our eyes.
Gods, I hope they don't do that. Can you imagine the sticky ads possible when they know just where you're looking? It'd get really annoying if the image followed my vision in space instead of staying put. Besides that, the eye actually introduces a continuous jittering in order to compensate for the human visual system's tendency to ignore static retinal images. Oh gods! the fnords! THAT's what they are.
unlike a CRT's phosphors, our retinas do not have separate 'pixels' for red, green, and blue
Actually, we do. I dont remember the details, but some of our retina's cones and rods capture only specific colors. Color blind or people are people with disorders of such specific cones and rods, when it's not due to brain issues.
I'm partly color blind, as I have difficulty seeing yellow.
When our retina differs from CRTs, however, is resolution, of course.
One good place I found for info on this is this place, and for info specif to color vision, this sub-section is handy.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
I saw a prototype of this system many years ago at the University of Washington HIT lab. Red mono only, and took a table, but it looked pretty good. I'm realling looking forward to consumer color models... maybe in another 10 years. Getting this up and running is just one of many steps towards becoming a gargoyle. :)
There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
I just keep remembering the Star Trek episode with the retinal image game plugged into the pleasure centers of the brain. Of course that required Wesley Crusher to solve, so we'd all be DOOMed!
Add wireless networking and instead of having to look for a band on someones sleeve during a firefight at the local paintball field your box could show everyone who isn't on your team (cause remember it knows where everyone *on* your team is) with their entire body covered in a big bulls eye (hmmm, have to make it smart enough to not do that for the ref I suppose).
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Poliglut
Um, just replace "www" with "channel" and you don't have to reg.
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The manager at Microvision came to where I worked last summer to do a deomostration. Our company was investigating wearable computers for some time critical missions. The estimation is, if the engineerers can save 10 minutes per job with the wearable computer, then in 10 jobs we will get our money's worth.
:)
The thing wasn't too big as compare to a Xybernaut.(Which I played with for a while as shown here. Please show this to your female friends and see if I can impress any of them. I thought it was more impressive than a Corvette, but so far I have no luck.)
It only displays in red because the other types of colored laser needs humongous sized equipment. And yes, this thing does shoot a laser in the eyes and when we questioned the safty thier manager told me they can show a great deal of proof of saftely machanism. If you have ever wondered about how it was possible to shoot laser precisely into your retina, well, they actually use an array of rays, not just one set.
I have actually used the demo retina display for about 15 minutes. It works great under any type of light surroundings and image was razor sharp. They grey scale also worked like wonders.
Microvision claimed last summer that they will acheive 600x800 resolution in production, while they showed us the 640x480 model. Frankly it was good enough. But that is not the most important thing. What really seperates the retina display from LCD based display like what's used in Sony Glasstron and Xybernaut and other dozens of displays at last years' wearable computing expo is that retina display is the only method that TRUELY display information as a completely transparent display, so our engineerers can actually see what they are doing while reading information at the same time. How? The displayed image is actually focused on something like 3 feet (I forgot the exact number, and whether or not it is adjustable.) in front of you, so by changing your eye's focus point, You can swtich between the real world background and the retina display.
So how much was the damage? well I think they were saying that their projected price was something short of 20k. Makes your $500 glasstron looks like a gameboy's toy which it is. I personally would definitely throw in that money if I had it
Combined with face-recognition software, this technology might be a great way to work around face blindness. My life would be a lot easier if people's names would hover over their heads :)
The shareholder is always right.
Otherwise people around you will know that you've been surfing porn by the way you're frantically swatting the air in front of you.
The shareholder is always right.
It sounds like a great way to watch TV or read news headlines on the bus if you ask me, but the article discusses some more, um, useful applications.
Companies need to realize there's nothing more "useful" then what people want something for. Scientific and military applications are fine, but if they want to sell, they'll have implant TV, porn, and high level gaming. Government contracts are nice, but 90% of geeks using your technology to play Quake is even better.
The Good Reverend
I'm different, just like everybody else.
I wouldn't be worried about the safety, as long as there's no chance of the intensity of the laser increasing suddenly. Interestingly, I'm wondering if it really is a laser - the article never states that it is a laser, except by implication in the sentence,
"At first glance, pointing a laser directly into your eyeball seems to fall somewhere between the risky and the downright foolhardy. "
but it may just be a narrow, projected beam of light, not lased light. I'd be curious to find out more about that. After all, if it's a laser, and you want a color display, you'll need THREE lasers, for each of the primary colors, scanning along side each other (unlike a CRT's phosphors, our retinas do not have separate 'pixels' for red, green, and blue).
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Are you a soccer mom?
Are you not content with distracting yourself from driving your Land Yacht with a plain old cellphone?
Do you hate how you have to miss the current episode of "Days of Our Lives" when you go to pick up little Jimmy from kindergarten?
Fear not! There is a solution to your problems - A retinal display!
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God help us all. The thing is, you KNOW there's going to be people who will do just that.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I've actually had the opportunity to use one of these, albeit a tabletop version in testing. It was interesting, especially becaus they hadn't yet worked out the color, and it was just red. It was really cool, though, because you could see right through the picture, but the picture was good, too. I coulld easily see myself using one in the future, if they got the color and portability worked out. One other thing I remember was that it was very sensitive to motion, that is, if you moved slightly, the image would disappear. That would need to be solved too, in order to make the device usable.
I'd say sooner, but I imagine it will be a while before your average consumer can afford to own a few pair.
I just hope I don't have old packman mazes burned into my retina when I'm 80.
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
Then follows the creation of a gaming industry centered around braille.... quake3 for the blind!
Acutally, I liked the idea Neal Stephenson used in Snow Crash: use the laser to rear-project onto translucent goggles the user's wearing. The indirection would keep the user safer from a system malfunction.
John
John
I never realized how annoying /. is . I'm the only poster here who knows about this stuff and I'm way at the bottom...
:-).
I work on that exact thing at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington. Right now I'm doing some work to identify doorways and staircases for the purpose of superimposing over the users sight. The VRD is great for this because it does not block normal sight Also, since the light enters the eye over a small portion of the lens, people with lens damage and such can still view the image.
I've seen some earlier posts that suggest than the VRD is/will be way to expencive. Let me tell you that it is not. The complexity of the device is much lower than a CRT or LCD screen. It takes us about two days and $15 dollars worth of readily available parts to construct one by hand. (Minus the computer to drive it of course.) I suspect a good and near invisible VRD will be available in 4 years for less than $100.
As far as the shooting lasers in to peoples eyes, it is not as bad as you think. People commonly associate lasers with high power. Our lasers can't cast a visible spot on a white piece of paper.Getting human subject approval is not picnic though
-Jordan Andersen
jordan@hitl.washington.edu
Basically, if you put this with a real-time speech recognition system that was a 1000x better, you effectively have created a wearable "real-time closed-caption" display for deaf people. They would use it in the everyday world whenever hearing people spoke to them, so that they know what a person said. I'm deaf myself and I would love to see something like this in sunglasses form.
Another application for the above product would be as a language translator for the tourist going abroad in other countries. The system would translate any foreign language into the wearer's native language and display it. Great way to learn the French language. =)
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
By the time I was poking around Fluke Hall at the UW the all red monochrome version had shrunk to the size of a small briefcase and was quite easy to use. They were working on a color version but it was still benchmount. I believe they were having trouble shrinking the blue laser. Pretty slick tech though :)
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Steve Mann has been using a system like this for years with his wearable computer systems. It creates what he's termed "mediated reality", which is just a cute term to describe the overlay of data onto reality as opposed to full virtual reality. It's pretty impressive, and fairly intimidating at first when you think about shining a laser directly into your eye.
The other form of mediated reality (and more commonly used as he only has a couple laser eyetaps) is similar to the standard LCD concept. Except, instead of displaying the data on an LCD screen that blocks out reality, the data is overlayed on a image of reality. The light rays that are reflected on the eye are colinear with what would normally be seen, so minimal distortion occurs.
It's pretty cool to see this sort of thing coming to market.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
Who was the brave soul who first agreed to that insanity?
Oh my God! They're shining light into people's eyes? What are they, INSANE???
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Now all you need is to strap Taco's Borg Box onto the helmet, and presto, instant self-entertainment system. Might be a little heavy...
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After their first 'virtual retina display' was prototyped, they had visitors in their lab looking at the device. One gentleman placed his right eye onto the scanner and went through the demonstration. When he was asked if he was thoroughly impressed with the demonstration, he replied, "Yes, but not with the demonstration itself, but rather the fact that I saw the demonstration with my blind eye."
The man only had the ability to use 5-10% of his optic nerves in his right eye. So he was partially blind but amazing nonetheless.
Here are other articles on the subject: an older zdnet story and '98 discover technology award
-sal terre
That hospital is focusing on clinical applications, like superimposing information about a patient, including vital signs and medical images, onto a surgeon's field of view.
Boy howdy... From what I know, nerve fibers were about the same thickness as human hair, right? Especially in tight places like the hands. It also seems like there are any number of delicate blood vessles, nerve tissues, tendons, etc, that would be about the same size as an 800x600 pixel. I don't know about you, but I would much rather my doctor get a possibly distracting earful of my vital signs if my chest is hanging open than have them superimposed over the top of my delicate internals.
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I tried one of these out late last year when Microvision was at the AUSA convention. I wouldn't say that it doesn't interfere with your vision, however; you have a small screen in front of your eye, which is translucent but colored as well. It's a very far cry from just having something appear in your vision as an augmentation to normal sight.
Also, due to the fact that a small blue laser for this application has yet to be invented (and for that matter, ANY blue laser with a long lifespan that can be used for this application), color displays are quite a long way off. They have the red and green, but blue is a major problem.
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"Doing that will make you go blind."
Now it may be true.