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Companies To Invade Your Retinas As Soon As Next Year?
Engadget is one of many reporting that Brother and NEC both seem to have retina display technology in the works for release next year. Brother, at least, seems to have a fully functional prototype, while so far NEC is mostly talk. "Naturally, there are a few considerable limitations compared to more traditional displays, but the company's as yet unnamed goggles do promise to beam an 800 x 600 image directly into your retina that'll appear as a 10-centimeter wide image floating about one meter in front of them -- which is certainly no small feat, even if it may not be the most practical one. Slightly less specific, but also working on a retina display of its own is NEC, which apparently hopes to incorporate a microphone into their display and use it as a real-time translation device that would quite literally display subtitles as you talk to someone."
I always remember faces, but names are tough. Here I could finally know everyone's name (combined with some facial recognition software).
This will be awesome for 3d games (first person shooters).
One image per eye, producing a 3d scene.
I imagine generation 1 will look weird with all the images being in focus, even though the Z distance varies.
With a little more work, generation 2 could detect what you are trying to focus on - like those eye test machines do - and produce a more realistic scene - blurry in the background, sharp foreground.
It would be cool to hit a key and have the scene zoom on what you're looking at.
It is very different. This system uses a scanning system to disperse the light energy over the retinal display area. If the scanning system fails for any reason and the laser stays focused on one "pixel" for an extended period of time, all the energy will be focused in one spot. Result: instant scitoma.
See, that's the awesome thing. They put a tiny camera on the other side, then project what the camera sees/the device obscures right onto your retina, plus some extra info. It's like the projector isn't even there!
Sure there are some parallax issues, and one day you forget it's there, go to bed with it on, roll over, and gouge your eye out, but hey, that's the price of progress!
You won't know anything's wrong until its far too late.