Slashdot Mirror
Laser Powered Virtual Display
Tedger writes "The Feature has an article discussing an interesting portable display system developed by the University of Washington. Unlike your traditional mini displays mounted in glasses this system has no display, it is a 'virtual' display created by lasers and microscopic fast moving mirrors. The image is in fact printed onto the retina and has feasibly a infinite resolution. Can anyone say true VR?"
I for one welcome our retinal destroying overlords.
First post?
Laser images printed on the retina? what are the safety concerns with this? i would think "burn in" would once again be a serious issue.
Yea True VR.And later post another story on slashdot -" Laser Powered Virtual Display causing blindess - reported"
Why does yahoo do this
Can laser on your retinas be good for your eyes?
...porn while at work!
You may have to stick one of those yellow Class I Laser Product stickers on your forehead when you use them.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Puts hiro protagonist's display to shame (his required glasses I think) Wonder how long before someone tried to snowcrash a person through it :D
My Portfolio
Even if they do work out all the bugs in the system, it's still only a step toward true VR at best. Without ways to also stimulate all our other senses, this will be more akin to TV than VR.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Weren't there glasses with LEDs projecting on your retina already? Those certainly sound safer than lasers.
But can it play Laser Floyd? Woooooooo!
Back in 1999.... I haven't RTFA, much less compared the two. Somebody has?
I recall researching such "direct imaging" devices back in 1995; they were going to be the next great thing in VR, back when virtual reality was still a meme. What is neat is the idea of wide integration, though safety issues even with low power lasers would, I imagine, remain a problem.
As an analogy, consider headphone use vs. speakers. In the headphone case, you can easily damage your ears without even noticing you're doing it by having it a tinsy bit loud, while the speaker output makes it much harder (I imagine due to all that feedback to the rest of your body!) Similarly here, you are probably imaging on a limited part of your retina, which may make your eyes dilate open too much, and develop small damage over time, etc.
Either something incredibly dangerous (Do Not Look Into New Monitor With Remaining Eye) or amazingly trippy (with Pink Floyd playing in the background).
True VR True VR!
What do I win?
can anyone say "can anyone say?" yes, anyone can, and its losing its punch.
Currently only works in red.
I recently read a book "The Visionary Position" which detailed the university of washingtons virtual reality lab and all of the various spin-off companies.
It wasn't a bad book, but they've had these things since the mid-90's -- just hard to find an appropriate market I guess.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
keep wondering, with all theses tricks, how will machines be able to interpret things? We want computers and robots to eventually replace a lot of what we do for ourselves...but how will the robot be able to tell when Southpark's playing on the TV when all its "sees" on the box are bands of moving light, but our brains put together a real picture.
Sure Bart, the Laser displays were great for the first 10 years, but then your eyes fall out!
After all the obstructive heads up type units we finall have one with the potential to co-exist with our normal field of vision. The "augmented reality" could give us new ways of seeing the world, with a 3-d overlay on reality. In the article they mention and automotvie expert system which will give the user a visual overlay of the system their looking at.
Also it should give you the ability to use PDA's in a private fashion while still having a large view. In fact, this could redefine the PDA format, instead of the little notepad style device. Just gotta get the production levels up, cost down, so it's more affordable than the $4000 price tag.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
Cell phones with frikkin laser beams mounted on them.
a l_ boy.txt
Nintendo came out with a video game system based on a similar technology, but it failed miserably. Read more about it here:
http://db.gamefaqs.com/portable/vboy/file/virtu
Here's another, similar product:
http://www.mvis.com/nomadexpert/index.html
I would think the fact that lasers only emit one color of light at a time might be a problem, will they somehow combine them on the mirror?
where do the friggin sharks come in the picture?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Didn't we see this already?
My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
nos laetus epulor qui would domito nos
Now he just needs some sharks to go with those freaking laser beams.
Hopefully this report means that they've made another advance in this form of projection. Remember that lasers are just light, so if their concentration is low enough it is basically the same as looking at your computer monitor (which bathes you in light.)
Still not something I'd want to spend long, long hours doing, though.
This isn't a redundant post; I just set my threshold to 6.
Would be if, since they're already sticking us with a laser beam in the eye, was if they could track eye movements.
This way we coul play tetris (or by that time Grand Theft Auto on a cell phone) just by tiny eye movements.
It's all fun and games until someone burns an eye out.
Verizon is offering these phone for free, if you sign up for their 16,000-month LaseyPay Plan. It's only $195/month, but you get a Lasik procedure tossed in no extra cost.
sigs, as if you care.
The resolution depends on the ability to steer the mirror in a very exact manner.
Mounting it on glasses makes it a nontrivial task.
With some head tracking you could theoretically be surrounded by a globe of 3d video? I wonder if the image would be opaque enough as to block out all other sources of light, or is it only intended to overlay existing scenes? I'm so glad I have a girlfriend who is a techno junkie too, because when this thing goes mainstream I think I'll never leave my house. Add this with the pressure sensitive body suit, the smell generating devices, and a few kleenex and well...
Dr. Thomas A. Furness III
... Nintendo's Virtual Boy!
Are they really taling about resolution, or about scaling of a vectorized image ? of course you can scale vector graphics as you want, but this ain't new... If they can display bitmap graphics at any resolution without pixelisation, that's impressive. But i doubt it...
As a lawyer, I applaud such products!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
If Virtual Reality is VR, is a Virtual Display something I should see my doctor about?
The article has been removed I think... anyone got a mirror?
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
I mean, if I remember my optics correctly, the way the cornea/lens assembly works is that all incoming light originating at the same point out there ends up in the same spot on the retina, regardless of which path they take through the lens. This is what enables us to see a clear image.
Although it has certain other intersting proerties, laser light obeys normal refraction.
Yet they talk about suåperimosing the image on the normal view. How can you project to any other part of the visual field than the area where you see the projector?
Anyone know what the trick is?
sudo ergo sum
After about 24 hours straight, you might actually be able to read the IT section on Slashdot!
I used to work for a company that produced a High Resolution Display that used mirrors to steer a red or blue laser beam onto a sheet of photochromic film - the blue laser would permanently write on the film - the red laser could be used for drawing small amounts of vector graphics - a cursor, or a few characters of text. Doing complex graphics in vector mode when the persistence of the human eye is less than 40ms will require the mirror to be scanned at very high frequencies
I'm not too worried about safety: if you limit the maximum power output of the laser, even in case of short-circuit, it shouldn't be a problem.
This is a technical problem, engineers have been good at solving those.
The human limitations may be much more difficult to overcome: show a 'static image' to a moving man and you have a problem: eye say static, inner ear say 'you're moving' --> conflict --> sea-sickness!
Well, it obviously can't have an infinite resolution, the best it could get is 1:1 mapping with the rods and cones in the back of your eye.
And of course this is old fashioned analog technology, just like in a CRT firing beams of electrons in the rough direction of dots in the phosphor, it's not accurate. What you need is a direct digital plug in the back of your optic nerve!
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
If the device breaks, and the beam sticks in one place, can't it burn a spot on your retina?
a whole new importance
anyone has seen those old screens with the burned init screen of an ms-dos app readable even when turn off? don't want a "water-mark" on my eyes, thank you.
DON'T PANIC
"Can anyone say true VR?"
Can anyone say who the hell still cares about VR?
I mean, really, even if there are still applications for such systems, is "VR" still the term to describe them? Until my "virtual" world can look at least as realistic as FF, I don't want to enter the "virtual world". I can see shitty slightly unrealistic renditions of the real world if I don't sleep for a few days or drink rather heavily, and that's cheaper and more fun.
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
"
This topic keeps revisiting Slashdot. Similar articles about the University of Washigton research or Microvision have been posted many times before over the past 6 years or so.
Microvision, the company that makes this stuff commercially, came out with "Nomad" quite a while back, and they've apparently done some heads-up displays for the military too. Sales never looked too brisk (though I haven't checked lately), and they seem to be incapable of making the complete displays as small as many of the articles seem to suggest. Also they've always been very expensive.
If they could come out with a small, sub-$1500 full color system, they'd probably get more orders than they could fill, but not many people want to wear a giant half-helmet system on their face that only displays red, not to mention the belt pack that comes with it. Don't let their pics with baseball caps make you believe these things are smaller than they actually are. The scanning engine itself might be "thumb sized", but add all the other crap they need to make it work and it gets bulky. (I imagine lenses, cables, controller, and power supply take up the bulk of the system--I haven't dissected them, but I've seen pics of how big the complete systems really are--Nomad was freakin' huge.)
I do hope they continue their research and make it smaller and smaller, though. Look like they have great potential, but I've been waiting over half a decade. Maybe another 10 years.
can we get a screenshot?
/.? shame shame shame on you money grubbing osnd folk
why the fsck did I just see a get the facts add on
Given the possiblility of drivers adding more power to the laser, the newest online craze will be "Online Lasic Surgery".
Laser light is fundamentally different from natural light ... its a coherent group of photons; all approximately in phase, traveling in the same direction with roughly the same energy. This stuff isn't normally encountered in nature. Its hard to say what long term exposure to this sort of radiation is going to do to sensitive tissues like those found in human eyes ...
I'm being general here; not saying it couldn't be safe. In any case its completely different from looking at light scattered from a screen, staring at a light bulb filament, or seeing an image formed by separate little light-sources (pixels) on a CRT.
They must have diffraction/interference problems stuffing a laser straight into an eye like that?
Its made by,
"Redmond, Washington-based Microvision"
What the fuck. Does everybody in Redmont have a small.... And some have soft. too.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
6 years ago or so they where working on this type of system here at the university. I had the pleasure of trying it out (after signing a disclaimer of course :). At the time is was red only, but very very cool. They couldn't focus the beam depending on what distance you were focussing on. So the images they projected where sharp only at one fixed "focus distance" for your eyes.
They could produce a low resolution overlay image over what you were actually looking at. They could only produce very simple line drawings floating in the air. But still.. you had your own private (head ache inducing) lasershow.
I would think that this design would require the user to always look directly forward. Otherwise the laser wouldn't hit the same spot when the user looked slightly to the side. The visual distortion that this would cause would probably make you pass out. In order to really make it work you would probably need to track eye movement as well. Although this is possible, it seems like it would be error prone and would make the system too expensive for consumer use. The bottom line is that unless they place the laser emitter right on your cornea, any eye movement would cause distortion and make the user very dizzy. The further the distance between the emitter/mirror and your cornea, the bigger the impact of even tiny eye movement.
but it just occured to me that as much as I like to see it, I don't want "Apple ][" burned into my eye, the way it is burned into my old monochrome monitor.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
BBC has an article on it as well.
t m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3647437.s
I have serious concerns about anything shooting lasers into my eyes. I know, all screens are already projecting light into my eyes, but that is slightly different.
But, that instinctive fear aside, this could be really cool. I mean, small HUDs of high quality have been wanted for near-onto forever. Now, some of those Sci-Fi stories where nobody has monitors because they are useless might start to come true.
This system is guaranteed to be dangerous if the micromirrors stop moving. Consider a system that paints 1000x1000 array of dots on the retina with a normal brightness. If one axis locks up, the system will paint a line of line 1000 times brightness than normal. And if Both X and Y axes lock up, then the laser will paint a spot 1,000,000 times brighter than normal.
Even if this is functioning normally, it could still cause damage due to the intensity of the scanning spot, regardless of the ultra-short duration of the spot. When it comes to photochemical reactions, the effects are not invariant with the product of duration and intensity -- a short burst of intense light causes more reaction than a much longer and lower intensity exposure. In photographic film, this is called reciprocity failure. It is also why museums prohibit flash photography (the short, intense burst of light does much more damage than does a steady low-intensity light source).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Or, more suitable, the Robot will request access to the feed being received by the person and on getting permission, will then understand the "environment" being experienced.
This reminds me of Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson ...
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/publications/r-97-3 1/
This appears to go more into depth from a technological standpoint.
Seems to be using the retina like a CRT uses a phosphor screen.
Here comes John Edwards and his ilk with
their sudo-science class action lawsuits.
Billions of dollars from millions
of 'blind people' who couldn't be revived
with stem cells...
The resolution is limited both by the resolution of your retina and by the aperture size of the iris.
(Rayleigh's Criterion, related to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle)
For rather obvious reasons both limits result in approximately the same resolution.
To match that resolution the lasers aperture actually has to be at least as large as the iris, which is rather unlikely for a system build to be small.
</nitpicking>
shooting a laser onto my retina is not my idea of a smart thing to do?
Actually, this is a well documented issue if the display uses IPv4. (Scroll down to item #3).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Can any one say true VR?
I'm sure they can and will, but until this thing gets green and blue lasers, or reality turns everything red, we'll still be waiting for it.
Can anyone say true VR?
Wait, wait, wait... REAL VIRTUAL REALITY, I think that Merriam Webster would say that this is a very confuzzling sentence.
I can just imagine the driving implications.
The eye is also sensitive enough to detect individual photons under correct circumstances.
first http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/04/15/205822 3&tid=126 2 8&tid=126 5 5&tid=126>
.... and i mean BUT ... how many news should we see that the technologie exist but it's a prototype and nobody actualy have seen any of this ?
second http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/26/15542
third http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/08/02/11322
Oki i'm gona get flamed. This would be a superb idea for a display device but
Am i the only one that's bugged by that expression?
If reality is virtual, it isn't reality; hence not true. It's like saying true three-legged bipeds.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Okay, just a few things about this and some problems.
... bah, it's enough already.
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
These guys have been at it for quite awhile with some nice results.
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
No, it's definatly not VR, it's realisitically no different to wearing red-green glasses and watching a 3d movie.
True VR can only be achieved in a handfull of ways, shooting lasers into your eyes is not one of them.
Some examples of real VR possibilities...
1. Holodeck. And I mean, a Holodeck like in Star Trek, nothing less than a fully immersive system, capable of *physically manifesting* (even if it's just "photons and forcefields") an entire environment that you can travel around in and interact with - AS IF IT IS REAL, if you were placed in the holodeck you should not be able to tell it from reality.
2. Induced, assisted and prolonged lucid dreaming. If we can find way to both induce and prolong lucid dreaming, and provide assistance to the dreamer such that they can more easily control the dream. Lucid dreaming is the closest we can get to true VR right now, I think this is our best option for recreational VR, but because we can't (yet) share dreams, or implant designed things into dreams, it's no good for most other tasks.
3. Direct brain interaction. Hook your head right up to the (currently impossibly powerful) computer which will feed all your senses directly, while disabling outside stimulation. It will have to read your mind so that you can interact with the 'environment'. This isn't really realistic currently, but I put it here because who knows about the future.
A litmus test for VR should be that it gives you memories that you can not distinguish for memories of "real world" things you have done. If somebody asks you, "did you ever jump off the top of the grand canyon" and you reply "no, but a computer shot lasers into my eyes to make me see what I might see if I did", then you have not experienced VR.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
One of the problems with these devices is that they tend to end up classified as medical devices due to the tight integration with the retina.
This stuff is cool, but I don't see it becoming available in the U.S. any time soon. I would worry about a bad capacitor or something that suddenly released an hour's worth of exposure in a microsecond and fried my retina. Somebody with more engineering knowledge of these systems may know whether that's impossible or not, but it will always represent a consumer concern, I imagine.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Unless there is an separately calculated image for both eyes, and a head tracking unit, it will not appear like an object is "virtually in front of you". Without these two things, you simply have a 2D overlay on your regular vision. The separate images are required to make your eyes focus at a particular distance, the head tracking so that when you walk rightward, the object goes leftward, etc.. Perhaps the technology is there, but not described in the article...
Be sure to swap out that $15 Belkin surge protector before you fire it up
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Audio we're coming close to. A really good home theatre system with proper placement can be quite realistic.
/.), and others, I'd imagine it's just getting the nerve attachments/impulses right that is holding us back for now.
Smell... well they're working on smell-generating devices but there's not really a "virtual" way to do this. You can't exactly plug into your olfactory to stimulate the nerves there.
Touch, again... too much to cover and no proper way to stimulate, and taste may go along with smell.
Right now, we're doing a lot better at covering vision and sound. The only way we'd go too far beyond that would likely be direct interaction with the nerves/brain. If you're worried about the laser damaging your eyes... how do you feel about plugging your brain into doom 8?
Still, some day it's likely to go that path. Likely it will start with optical/cochlear implants for the blind/deaf, progressing with limb replacements etc with direct nerve connections that can feel and move realistically. Actually, with things such as "dracucell" (blood powered batteries, mentioned long ago on
At the moment, I think I'll stick with my laser-glasses and 3d projected surround... any improvements on such are of great benefit as is.
Besides, if we were wired for smell/taste, goatse pranks could be 100x as bad if you stumbled into the wrong URL with your sensors on.
Well, no smoke but the mirrors do have to be in the visual field as you suspect. They seem to underplay this aspect of their "novel" technology. The only difference between their technique and a tiny reflected miniture display is the laser beam goes directly to the retina whereas a miniture display disperses light in other directions as well so the laser technique would be more energy efficient and enable brighter displays with better contrast. Though, I don't think energy usage and heat disapation is a problem with miniture displays. It might have an application for military uses where side lighting from conventional displays could give your position away and make you visible to enemy combatants.
I can imagine playing Quake 3 or UT on that thing! Now I gota convince my wife...
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
assuming the safety issues can be addressed, does the technique permit focusing the virtual image on parts of the retina OTHER THAN the fovea? For people with macular degeneration and other impairments to vision, the combination of the placiticy of human neural connections and the ability to create novel stimulation might allow the "retraining" of visual pathways to improve visual function.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
I'm sorry to spoil poster's joy, but aren't these and
these folks already selling such devices for many months, if not years?
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes
Yup. No heat, wind, cold, gravity effects etc etc... however it is quite an amazing sensation when your enitre peripheral vision filled and wherever you move your eyes is still filled and there appears to be no outside world visible anymore.
Graphics cards STILL need to get a LOT faster though.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Hmm, interesting quote at the bottom of the page showed up for me reading this.
"What you don't know can hurt you, only you won't know it."
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
Consider a display with typical XGA-range resolution. Since there is a single laser and roughly 1 million pixels, the scanning laser spends one millionth of its time on a single pixel, yet that pixel has to be bright enough to be visible. So what would happen if the mirror mechanisms failed while the laser was on? The laser would rest at a single spot on the retina with an apparent intensity about 1 million times that required to be a visible display. I would hazard to guess that that would indeed cause retinal damage.
These things have been around for at least 10 years (and the same people have been working on them). People used to do the same thing with LEDs as well, and there have been commercial products.
I'm not sure what people expect of these things, but you still have to look at them to see something and so it's not all that different from looking at any other screen. The potential advantage these systems have are power consumption, size and weight, but it remains to be seen whether those can be realized in practice and whether other technologies don't end up being more cost-effective in the end.
Microvision (www.mvis.com) has been doing intra-occular and retinal projection displays for the military and medical applications for atleast a decade... I recall trying out one of their red-beam 800x600 systems at 1996's SIGGRAPH.
It's an impressive system and just needs serious miniaturization, but I look forward to a day when I can see the world "in code" a la The Matrix.... or some of the really bad dreams I've had of late... 8^}
The applications are pretty amazing if they can really keep the size to the sleek design that all their geek-runway prototypes portend.
word,
Levendis47
--==[ AOL YIM ICQ : Levendis47 : levendis47@yahoo.com ]==--
dream: location-based information about the buildings you pass appears in front of you
reality: ads for things you can buy in the buildings you pass appear in front of you
dream: a tiny red bullseye appeared to lead you to your vehicle
reality: a tiny red bullseye appeared to remind you of the 20% off sale at your local Target store
It's cool to see more stuff seen on Star Trek coming out for real. In this case I refer to the episode of Deep Space 9 where Cisco and the others steal a Jem Hadar warship and the viewscreen consists of a pair of glasses which uses a laser to display the image inside the eye. That way only the commander of their ships know what is going on. It had the neat effect of letting Cisco turn his head and the view turn with him, giving him a 360 degree view outside his ship.
I can see this technology being of great use to fighter pilots and astronauts in the future.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
True VR eh? I think the real question should be..."Can anyone say...retina damage?"
28:06:42:12 - That is when the world will end...
Imagine a power spike! --Ouch!
Blogging because I can...
true VR
This looks a whole lot like what Steve Mann has been doing for several decades. He was doing research on wearable displays at MIT for a long time, now he's at the University of Toronto.
Not to say that his way of doing things isn't freakishly strange, but he's definitely a leader in the area:
http://wearcam.org/
http://eyetap.org/mann/
http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com/science_
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/14/i
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/cyborg_ma
I met him at a lecture he gave at McGill last year. I think he's a little out in left field, but he's also very bright, and deserves credit. He's been wearing this kind of laser device for some time now, and doesn't seem to have any retinal burn-in.
I think that you'd have to consider the intensity levels involved, it's a matter of wavelength, intensity and duration of exposure. It's quite possible that the 3 combined make this extremely safe. My approximation is that you probably risk more eye-damage from looking directly at a halogen desk lamp bulb.
His system is more interesting, because he includes a camera, and does image processing to include relevant information about the outside world onto the retinal image that is being displayed: ie. names of people (yes, little laser overlayed name tags), recalling facts and so on. I'm not sure how successful his systems are, but the way he speaks about them, they work fairly sucessfully.
That is all.
The social implications of any advancement can be interesting.
... draw pictures on their retinas, deserves whatever they get. :-)
Although our eyes don't have great resolution (10m 'pixels' total, with more density in the center of our field of vision), we have *TERRIFIC* interpolation, allowing it to not only stabilize a shaking image (blood pulses our eyes, and we don't exactly stand still - keep your hand still and look carefully at it), but also to interpolate missing points through time. Try looking through a screen door standing close - if you're very still, you'll see pixelated trees through the screen door. Once you start walking, your brain adjusts and you can see "through" the screen.. not that hard. Now imagine that the screen is not a metal impasse but just an absence of cones/rods. Same idea.
Now, I mentioned DMDs in the subject-- they are digital micromirror devices also called MEMs, micro-electromechanical-systems. These are what the article states the Virtual-Reality lazer-image is based on. I want to note that while DMDs are far better than lcd-projection (not lcd - lcd *projection* -- where light is either shone off a small high-density lcd screen and reflected out, or where light is shone through a translucent high-density lcd screen), and the contrast/brightness abilities of DMDs are amazing (no loss to semi-permeable substances like lcd), the *COST and RESOLUTION* of these DMDs are not fantastic, especially when you're limited to a wearable-sized DMD. Underneath every micro-mirror is a *MECHANICAL* lever, controlled by an electrical pulse (MEMs), these are not simple, these require lots of moving parts, and a polished *MIRROR*. The moment I said mechanical and mirror I hope everyone understands the limits to dpi of the DMD. While we can obtain arbtriarily high resolution VR, it will no longer be wearable. The lazer would need to be backed by a DMD the size of a sheet of a paper if you want a billion pixels, not to mention the high cost of that producing that.
The solution to cost and size is viable, albeit not commercial yet. GLVs (grating light valves) are in research (I believe stanford univ. is ahead more than others in this technology) and deal with thin film hundreds of nanometers apart from each other which can widen or narrow the space thereby controlling the wavelength of light that passes (color) and the trajectory of the light (position). At current tech. levels, GLVs are 1000x faster that DMDs (you don't need to flip a lever and turn a mirror a large amount), and since we don't care about FPS higher than 30, that extra 1000x speed translates into 1000x *less* material, since we can control the trajectory, we can with an array of 1024 GLVs mimick a 1024x1024 matrix of a DMD. And GLVs have the potential to be 1,000,000x faster, which means next to no material while acheiving equivalent resolution of a gigantic DMD. And cost - yes, with next to no material being involved, the manuf. cost will be peanuts (rest assured they won't sell for peanuts.. hey, we R&D folks need a salary to buy toys!)
Sounds like the advertising displays in Minority Report to me. Therefore, I say we shut these guys down before they get any closer to production-ready..
Virtual Gameboy? It was a great idea. But wasnt there a bit of a problem with eye strain from it?
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I'm surprised nobody brought up VR goggles from Snow Crash yet :) Same idea, but instead of the retina, the laser was sweeping across the goggles and the eye was picking the image up from its surface the regular way. Neat and very elegant idea if you ask me.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
"One can watch the Sun in a telescope exactly two times in a lifetime. First - with left eye, second - with the right."
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I'll finally be able to get a frickin' laser attached to my own head.
The IR laser from a CD-ROM drive is relatively harmless. Power is typically about 0.1 mW which is not enough to cause signficant injury without a very high quality focus. OTOH, the (visible) red laser from a new DVD-RW drive is powerful enough to be a fire risk, let alone a health risk. The latest 16x writing drives need 0.2 - 0.3 W output.
Could you please provide more information about the risks involved with using headphones? In particular, I'd like to know how loud is too loud, and how to know where the safety point is.
I definitely like to listen to loud music by means of headphones (generally because those around me won't let me listen to loud music through speakers), and I'd like to know how to avoid hearing loss.
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'nuff said.
You mean TV isn't real?
My eyes! The googles! They do nothing!!!
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I've seen this before. Star Trek TNG Episode 106 - "The Game". Sure it looks neat, but in reality it's an addictive mind control device meant to enslave humanity. Obviously this guy is already a slave to it.
Judging from the release date it must be the finished version of Duke Nukem Forever. After 100+ years of development it would be a hell of a game.
Episode Guide
The Imagic retinal-scanning color microdisplay display from MicroVision uses a single dual-axis pivoting micromirror to create SVGA-resolution images by rapidly scanning a single pixel directly on the retina to produce an unpixelated image.
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Burn holes in the trash bags of beautiful men or women, and get them to notice you! Yeah, right.
This sort of system seems like it would enable us to reach parts of the colour spectrum which are otherwise untouchable by computer graphics.
You can't really get a vibrant orange out of a computer monitor, because it lies outside the RGB colour cube, but these lasers could easily be run at greater than 100% of a conventional monitor's intensity.
Maybe this sort of system would be the answer to the last real limitation in graphic design. :-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Frederik Pohl thought of a system that would write an image directly onto the retina of the eye in 1952 - anybody know of an earlier reference?
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