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Retinal-Scanning Screen Prototypes
Troed writes: "Microvision demonstrated a prototype display that uses three leds and a mirror to display SVGA
graphics from something small enough to be put into cellphones." Not
a lot of technical details, but what's there looks good. It'll be
a few years at best before the prototypes turn into real products, and
I'm not quite sure I want to beta test this one, but I sure can't
wait for when they are ready for prime time.
Now we'll not only hear about cell phones causing brain cancer, now the press will be warning us that we could put our eyes out.
Major usability issue here, if you have to hold the thing right in front of your eye to view it. Cell phones are dangerous enough with people holding them to their ears, can you imagine the pileups if folks started holding them in front of one eye while driving.
Seems to me this would be more applicable to VR goggles, or head's up displays.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Ummm... we're not talking about scanning the retina for identification. This is a new kind of display.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Probably not, since Microvision just developed the prototype.
But I see where you're coming from with the idea, no pun intended. Ever try to focus on a close up object? It's rather difficult, so I figure eyestrain would be a factor.
Also, the article is somewhat light on the specifics on usage, how close to the eye, power usage (current and intended market), etc.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
~~~
Akk, wrong way round, this is not retinal scan this is retinal projection!
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Ummm, this isn't eye-scanning in the traditional sense (looking at your iris/retina for security/identification purposes), but as a display.
:-)
"Retinal scanning" is a confusing term for this article to use; they mean the transmitted image is scanned across your retina as the mirror moves, so you can see the image, not so it can see your eye.
Hmmmm. If they can project it on to your eye bright enough, I wonder if with a bit of modification they could project it onto the airplane seat in front of you. A tiny projector for travel would be very cool
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Okay, I can see this as a new type of Glasstron like system for portable DVD players (has to be cheaper than the 8" LCD on current ones). But in no way should this be in a cell phone. I can barely walk and talk on one of those, but walk, talk, and view a movie, I'd hurt people. In a car, I'd be a moving traffic violation.
One other question, what about those of us with glasses, can the system work around that, or will I have to start wearing a monocle like Mr. Peanut?
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
Just because the projecting device is close to your eyes doesn't mean your eyes have to focus close. I'm sure the angle of the projection is such that your eyes can comfortably focus at a (virtual) distance of 18" or so.
Have you ever used a ViewMaster?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Anyone remember the advertising in Diamond Age where images were broadcast directly into the eyes of passersby on the street? I can imagine this on a scale where these are placed in strategic locations in supermarkets, on the street, heck even the freeway. Scary, that you could have images directly placed onto your retina that are beyond your control (other then closing your eyes) Talk about mucking with reality, but then there's a whole new market for special sun glasses that reflect this kind of bombardment... Oakley Ad Blockers!
Now you can just superimpose a cute face and slender figure instead of having to drink one into place! Think of the cost savings!
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
and I'm not quite sure I want to beta test this one,
That's like saying you don't want to test a View Master 3D toy because you're afraid they might have put a search-light-power light bulb inside.
Do you really think they're putting a 1 watt laser in this thing?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Any kind of light ultimately damages the eye. Some types do more damage than others. Lasers, notorious for being high power and having the ability to easily blind people have gotten a bad rep. Low-power lasers do very little harm, probably less harm than a few minutes outdoors on a bright Winter day. I believe they are doing this now, or will be starting to, paint images on the retina directly using a laser for flight and other types of training.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
(What the heck?!?!?)
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
Now what i'd like to see is this technology applied to creating a cheap display for consumer devices. I used to design consumer products (cordless, not cell, phones) and we were very interested in adding advanced features, but the cost of the LCD was always prohibitive.
What about increasing the intensity of the LEDs (Laser diodes perhaps?) and scanning a small portion of the wall adjacent to the device. Most people (the the US anyway) have fairly smooth, white walls. The only drawback would be getting it bright enough to be seen in a light room.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
.technomancer
Reminds me of the "Jeffrey's" Sketch with P. Brosnan - Will Farrel whips out his email pager -
He wears it on his finger, and it is the size of a matchbox. To read it he needs to put on magnifiying glasses and move the screen from side to side.
Really the only funny part of the sketch.
This is the same company. Their long-term goal is to be the premier provider for displays for virtual and especially augmented reality systems.
www.enthea.org
nope. here's the official list :
Herc/MDA 80 x 25 text
CGA 320 x 200
EGA 640 x 350
VGA 640 x 480
SVGA 800 x 600
XGA 1024 x 768
SXGA 1280 x 1024
UXGA 1600 x 1200
This sounds cool, and Im glad someone is on this track, in 20 years people will be sayign (as they do with TV) , 'People used to think this would hurt their eyes' , like my mom used to say about the TV.
I always love the sci-fi flicks where they have something like this on a thin stick near their eye, walking around in a dark smokey ship hold. a good slap upside the head and , ouch. no more eye.
Or the IBM commercial....same thing.
Im not so worried about the reitanl scanning effects, lasers(no not the little led jobbers), arcs, you name it and Ive looked at it. I can still see, I may have had vison problems for a day or so after some of the incidents but it healed(I know I understand some dont).
What Im WORRIED about is having something the size of a frigging pencil 1 inch from my eye, that sounds scarrier than potential retinal damage.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Just dont forget to turn on the screen saver, I would hate to have to look at a negitave of the same web page for the rest of my life.
One other question, what about those of us with glasses, can the system work around that, or will I have to start wearing a monocle like Mr. Peanut?
If the marketing sketches of the optic path accurately show the geometry of the system, you'd be able to see in focus without your glasses. (But your iris would have to be in the correct spot, i.e. you're looking in the right direction, or the image will disappear.)
The focus issue occurs because the light from a given real-world "pixel" arrives as a wide, essentially colimated (rays essentially parallel) beam, and your lens has to focus the light hitting it all over its surface down to a point, or a very small patch, on the retina. If your lens is less than perfect or not currently adjusted correctly, light from one real-world pixel striking different parts of it arrive at different spots on the retina, rather than all at one spot, defocusing the image.
Most displays illuminate the whole retina with a broad beam, allowing you to move your eye or head about and still see the image, but requiring your lens or lens-plus-glasses system to focus properly. This system MAY hit your eye with a narrow beam, which would reduce or eliminate the need for the lens to focus accurately.
But it would also require your eye to be in exactly the right spot, within the size of your pupil as viewed through your eye's lens. Eye motion would make you lose the image. So I suspect the display actually spreads out the light on its way to your eye, and you'd still need the glasses.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The problem is that the technology requires incredibly small, precise optics that move at high speed... this can be done, but they have yet to produce anything durable enough for consumer use...
.technomancer
Microvision was the first hand held video game system with cartridges.
:-)
Oh, wait - that's a different Microvision
While this may be a killer app, it certainly won't be for cell phones. I see the main market for this to be the replacement of active matrix notebook displays. If they can get the resolution to 1024x768, you can take that fold-up keyboard for palms and mix them with a small computer brick. The brick stays inside the bag and uses a possible wireless connection to the headset and keyboard. You could also replace desktop displays with this thing. Use some kind of shield to black out room light and you'll have a very emmersive heads up display. Wearable computers as well, maybe that's the cell phone angle. This reminds me of that ST:TNG episode where everyone was getting high on that head-moutned video game. Cool stuff.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Do you really think they're putting a 1 watt laser in this thing?
Doesn't matter if it's a laser or a diode, one watt or one milliwatt. If it's bright enough to paint a visible picture it's bright enough to fry the spot that's illuminated if the scanning stops with the beam on.
So they'll need a safety interlock of some sort to cut off or dim the light source if the scanning stops, or make the amount of light emitted dependent on the actual motion of the mirror, unless they can guarantee that the scanning failure modes all deflect the light away from the eye.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
At last! Pr0n on the morning train commute and no one will know... well, as long as I keep my coat on my lap anyway.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Most nearsightedness and farsightedness is caused by the eye, and consequently the retina, not being in the correct shape.The image is formed either too far ahead or behind the retina.
I read the article but I didn't see any mention of how the beam would project on malformed retinas. If you are farsighted and you use this Microvision system, will the image appear to be deformed as well? Will it look like you are sitting too close to the movie theater screen?
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
The term "retinal scanning display" comes from the fact that the beam (from lasers or LEDs) "scans" across your retina much like electron guns scan aross the back of a CRT. Not exactly the same, the good enough for an analogy.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
...well, when it comes to this arena anyway.
MIT's 'borgs have been using prototype retinal scanning displays from various companies that have offered them for at least half a decade.
Back around '97 I was really interested in wearables, but the availability of this type of display was always a problem, and all the suppliers that the MIT crew had listed no longer sold the devices (and they were only selling them as dev-kits anyway)
Read up on MIT's "Lizzy." The most popular display back then was a single LED (red) scanning display, with 320x240 resolution, but it was the same exact technology.
What happens if I sneeze? What if I develop pick-eye? What if my contact pops out since I didn't blink?
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Well, the technology seems basically identical to Nintendo's virtual boy, but with three leds (red, green, & blue) instead of virtual boy's one (red).
Same concept: a flashing LED is scanned by an oscillating mirror, and you hold the whole thing up close to your eyes.
The Virtual Boy came with an automatic-pause feature, wherein it FORCED you to take a break every 15 minutes. Additionally, a strong warning was stuck right on the machine... it was NOT to be used by young children, because PERMANENT EYE DAMAGE could occur.
Yikes.
It wasn't.
You're jealous, aren't you? Perhaps if you posted worthy comments instead of bitching about why others' posts are rated higher than yours, you might get +1 posting yourself.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Their little scanning laser thingie can scan a beam across your eye, sure, but if your eye is focused properly the position of the final spot on your retina is independent of where the beam comes into your eye. If the spot position depended on which part of your pupil the beam passed through, then your eye wouldn't be in focus -- normally light from a given object (like the screen you're staring at now) comes through all parts of your pupil simultaneously, so the sharpness of what you see depends critically on your lens getting the job done right. So it doesn't matter how they scan their little mirror-and-laser gismo, they aren't scanning the bright spot on your retina -- they're just shining a blinkenlight at your eye.
And, yes, this argument applies to the cool gizmos in Diamond Age, too. They just don't work.
Now, if you defocus your eye, deliberately NOT looking at the projector gizmo, the system might be able to work. Try it now: hold your thumb right in front of your eye. (Take off your glasses if you have to.) The edge of your thumb looks fuzzy, right? That's because light from the edge of your thumb is passing through several parts of your pupil, and your lens is NOT set correctly to focus that light onto your retina: light from different parts of the pupil hits the retina in different places.
That opens up a nice little loophole: if you deliberately defocus your eye, then the Microvision gizmo could conceivably use that defocus to map position on your pupil to position on the image, and project a nice image on your retina directly. That works in principle, but in practice is neither small nor cheap: they'd have to have some kind of machine vision to track your pupil, at the very least, and that kind of stuff is still expensive.
I wonder if that site is one of those FTC trolls?
Why a cuecat? Microvision plans to soon offer a wireless barcode scanner
:) Chop off the tail, add an RF transmitter and. . . .:)
On the other hand, this very well might be were all of those 'destoryed' cuecats are going too.
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You don't know true video game joy until you stand up for the first time after an hour or two (only pansies leave the automatic pause on!) of Red Alarm on a Virtual Boy and stumble your way around the house.
Damn, I wish that system would have taken off...I could use more games for it.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
So, apart from pairing the retinal scan with some kind of changable secret (say a password, etc), what happens when someone compromises the 'electronic version' of your retina? You can't really change your retina. Same goes for other biometrics.
Once they get this tech small enough, it sounds perfect for creating head mounted displays approaching an ordinary pair of sunglasses.
This could be an important step towards wearable computing!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Sorry, but ... what the hell are you talking about?
Viewmasters, camera viewfinders, LCD goggles, and dozens of other devices project an image onto your eye from a small distance in front of it. The image is sharp and in focus, and in fact your eye focuses on it as if it were actually a certain distance away from your face.
If your objects held any water at all, *none* of these devices would be possible. Are you suggesting that 21st century optics technology is incapable of making light enter your eyeball at the right angle?
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Since there seem to be a ton of unthought-out posts on this I thought I'd lend some words. Although it's at the risk of only skimming most of the posts as I don't have the time.
The research for this, or at least the bulk of it, is being done at the University of Washington in the Human Interface Technology Lab (HITL). I've been to a presentation by the guy who heads the project and it actually is pretty cool. I first heard about it long ago. Another post said Microvision started talking about it in 1993 and I think that's about when I first heard about it. There's a large chunk of funding coming from the military, of course, and they'll have the first crack at it if not already. Also, Microvision had either a small prototype or a simulation of one at a job fair that I attend in the last year and it was pretty dang sweet I have to say. The prototypes that are at the UW (yes, they have in fact built them) use diode lasers in stead of LEDs. Truly, the diode lasers are fine as they put far less light in your eye than ambient light does but LEDs are more public-masses friendly. Anyway, the UW page for this is hitl.washington.edu/research/vrd/. They've probably got more technical details than Microvision does.
"They're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, they're not my problem." --Deckard
I'll repost this, since the "anonymous coward" stuff tends to get ignored. This particular prototype was a full color cell phone demonstrator. It may be somewhat inconvienent to hold a phone up to your face, but you have to admit that a 21" virtual display might be nice... Of course resolution needs to be increased, of course it will be a year or two before you see the cell phone product. However, we do have a SVGA heads up product that began shipping this year. It is a monocrome red see through display that is bright enough to use in full sunlight. It's basically the same thing that the main chick was wearing in the begining of Final Fantasy (sprits within). It is being targeted for things like medical (surgury) and aircraft repair where you want to be looking at what you're working on while also having some data in your field of view (heart rate, schematics, whatever). It's a little spendy at the momment, so we aren't going for the general market, but you could do it in a binoccular setup to get 3D rendering or whatever. And I know you all probably will dissagree, but for an augmented reality display, you really only want monochrome anyhow. Full color images would block your view of the world and reduce functionality. Of course, we have a variety of full color prototypes. The goal is mobile computing, and anything else you can think of where you want a big bright display that doesn't take up any space. Ford, among others, is looking at using the technology in cars for in dash displays etc. Some of it is described at our web site, www.mvis.com. It works. It's cool. Don't knock it...
Take your simple Viewmaster. Holding a viewmaster slide right up against your eye illuminates different parts of your pupil with different bits of image -- light passes from the sun or the room lights or whatever through the slide and onto your eye, so there's a little image of the slide projected onto your pupil. What do you see? A blurry mess.
Now stick the Viewmaster slide into the viewer. Lenses in the viewer convert the positional information on the slide into angular information that your eye can process. What do you see? A nice picture of a dinosaur, or whatever.
The point is that the image can only be as big as the apparent size of the lens in the viewmaster. These guys have lots of graphics showing tiny lenses projecting into your eye from far away. That can't work the way that they say. The lens has to be able to get "at" all the different angles coming out of your eye.
It seems to me that they have a sort of (but not very) interesting technology and they're hyping it as the Next Big Thing. But the Big Thinginess comes from applications that are physically impossible. You don't need a laser diode and a scanning mirror to make a ViewMaster work, and there are very nice VR goggles and such that use conventional (if small) LCD displays.
But the screen is a crucial part of the LCD projector system. If you try to beam images straight into your eye with the projector, what do you see? Try it sometime -- stand in front of the screen. You see a bright lens that looks really tiny, because it's only 3" across and halfway across the room.
The only way to project images directly into your eye is with a lens whose apparent size is larger than the image you want to project (``apparent'' because you can use a close, small lens like a camera viewfinder, or a large, distant lens like those old Fresnel-lens projection televisions...)
If these guys are relying on you to hold their tiny 3" screen up to your head, they've just reinvented viewfinders, which is no big deal. If they want you to project images on the wall, they've just reinvented projectors, also no big deal. They seem to be claiming that they've invented something else entirely -- a screenless projector, if you will, like the interface that Hiro uses in The Diamond Age, but without the cool shades to scatter the light into his eyes. That's not possible, for the reasons I described (apparently not too clearly) above.
The important point is that different pixels have to come from different places, so that they could get into the pilot's eye at different angles (so that they'd hit different parts of the pilot's retina). You still can't beat the apparent-size-of-the-last-optic problem, because light travels in straight lines when it's not interacting with optics.
You've got it exactly. It's a screenless projector (or your retina is the screen), though it does have a lense to bounce it into your eye (or at least the head mounted ones do). The cell phone prototype sets the focus depth with a physical stop that you set against your head. The head mounted product, has a depth of field adjustment (as you mentioned) so you can set the image focus to match your preffered field of view. I believe (though I'm not sure) that the focus plane can be from about 2 feet and out. The NOMAD product is designed to be used while working on something, so the focus is usually very close. It really works quite well, and I haven't used the newest models.
But the "concepts" PDF on the site shows lots of applications where the graphics just hang in space, near a small-looking projector. (Check out the one with the Cessna dashboard, or the sports-car ``concept'' image). That's misleading and physically impossible, and that's what I'm complaining about.
The concept is not that an image will hang in the air (like you said, impossible). However, if there is an exit pupil in the dash and you look at it, you will see what appears to be a large screen superimposed onto you view of the dashboard. If you make the focus of the image significantly different than the where the dash is, you will only see the image (think looking through a screen door, you only see the screen if you focus on it.).
I think the real probem with this thread is that it started on the cell phone prototype, which has some flaws (being a first gen prototype and all).
The real products that we make are all head mounted displays.
where Riker brings back a head mounted thing from Risa (sp?) that projects an image right into your eyes. They called it "just a game", but it wound up enslaving the entire ship.
;-)
One of the few (if not the only) Wesley episodes I thought was good, and he got a hot girl to boot.
http://kered.org
Cool. Thanks for the info.
Cheers,
Craig