Slashdot Mirror
Demo of Prototype Virtual Retinal Head Mounted Display
muterobert writes with an article about a new head mounted virtual retinal display (technology last covered ages ago). The folks over at Road to VR took a look at an engineering prototype; from the article: "The Avegant HMD uses a virtual retinal projection display consisting of a single LED light source and an array of micro-mirrors. This differs from normal screens in that with a VRD there is no actual screen to look at. Instead, a virtual image (in the optical sense) is drawn directly onto your retina. . ... 'At one point I was looking at a sea turtle in shallow coral waters. Sunlight was beaming down from the surface and illuminating the turtle's shell in a spectacular way — it was one of the most vivid and natural things I've ever seen on any display. The scene before me looked incredibly real, even though the field of view is not at immersive levels.'"
i think this might completely overwhelm the occulus rift. the fact that it can be adjusted to your eyesight is pretty awesome as well.
Hopefully they have solved the issue of the light either being too dark to see clearly or bright enough to feel pain on your retina. If these have focus controls, I would like a pair of the opaque-shades style tuned to my prescription.
I've avoided "monitors on eyeglasses" for a while, feeling the technology still a bit weak, but damn am I ready to just turn on my direct-to-eye virtual system.
We're turning the corner, kids. I can't wait to see what's down the block.
Less deeply cool if the mirror control software locks up and you burn a line/spot into your retina.
Trying, plasma TV style, to run noise/wipes material through it to reduce retina burn-in would not be fun.
On the other hand, nice to see another step towards the Snow Crash universe. Just need a depleted uranium hypervelocity railgun and people will finally start listening to Reason.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Gee, what could possibly go wrong with that?
Well, someone else can try that technology. Once it's been in use for a decade or so I might think about it.
In the meantime, I am not willing to be the guinea pig for something like this. I've no interest in going blind for the latest shiny toy.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Summary contains the word 'Retina' as a substring. Expect aPPLE to begin legal action.
....I hope that nobody can remotely-project commercial ads to my eyes on the street.
Head worn video systems have frequently used moving mirrors to multiplex limited numbers of light transmitters into the conventional 2D array. There is NOTHING novel in this method whatsoever.
The nonsense about "beaming an image straight into your eye" is laughable as well. This is EXACTLY what any modern back-lit LCD tablet or phone does. The eye ALWAYS sees as a result of photons travelling into the eye- so their is NOTHING magical, unique or clever about 'non-screen' devices. And what does 'screen' mean anyway. Technically, a 'screen' is a surface you reflect light off, so, as I said, most of the computer devices you look at do not have 'screens' but DIRECT light sources, no different in concept from this Avegant HMD. Indeed, since Avegant uses a mirror, it has MORE of a conventional screen than your tablet or phone.
Can you trust any company that so fundamentally LIES in its PR releases, and pays technical sites to promote the PR BS as some amazing breakthrough?
The issue with head mounted images is always the same. Brightness. Resolution. Refresh rate. The optical system that controls apparent virtual position, FOV, and merging with the real surrounding (if the display isn't enclosed). Then you have issues of weight, battery life or power supply etc. Then you have issues of quality of head-tracking sensors, taking into account latency and maintenance of absolute accuracy.
Tech sites that specialise in VR coverage has an ABSOLUTE incentive to praise every hopeless piece of kit that comes their way, since their lifeblood is a constant stream of review and pre-release hardware. But the truth can be found in Google Glass and Occulus Rift - clunky half-baked solutions that are still better than everything that came before them, because up to now companies specialising in LIGHT, wearable VR products have been technically terrible in every respect.
When a company focuses on buzzword BS, you can discount any possibility that their products are going to be good.
It's the micromirror device. Duh. There is no fundamental optical difference between this, Google Glass, and Oculus Rift. The only differences are the size of the physical component that is the screen (very small in the case of Glass, medium in this case, much larger in the case of Oculus Rift) and the optics used for the light path (from trivial in the Rift to more complex in this case and in Glass) and thus also the apparent size of the screen to the wearer.
Retinal "projection" is just a fancy term for "making it look to your eye like there's a screen in front of it". There's no magic. Even with a scanning laser-based retinal projection system, where there is no physical screen (but a scanned laser creates a virtual plane that acts like one) you still need to cover the eye in a big lens and make the light seem to come from the same places it would come if there were a big screen in front of it. It's impossible to "project into your retina" from an angle and make the image appear to cover other parts of your vision that do not intersect with the projection system, because your eye's lens (like any other lens) is designed to not allow this to happen.
It's cool that we have different approaches to VR competing with each other, but let's not let the marketing folks get away with hand-wavey BS claims.
Snowcrash.
Do not look into Avegant HMD with remaining eye
It was on some show. It was distributed as a game involving getting pink Frisbee-like objects into purple articulating horns which emanated from holes in plane which extended off into the distance. Seems like it might be quite addictive.
Basically, they are shining three LEDs at you and moving where the light from those LEDs land. Ostensibly, laser is supposed to be usable safely in this sort of application as well, but this company steered away from even that.
So this isn't pointing something that is even particularly high powered or coherent at your retina, mostly just sidestepping the screendoor effect because the light path is being manipulated in a manner that isn't as discrete as an array of OLEDs accomplishing the same thing (the latter being easier since the LED state doesn't need to change nearly as fast with OLED or LCD as it would in a system scanning the retina with similar light source.
Still, not my cup of tea yet as the FOV isn't ambitious, and I think FOV is more key than eliminating the inter-pixel gaps (and in fact if mobile device industry continues their one-upmanship, a 7-inch 4k display might be viable and not matter much anyway).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
...because this doesn't look at all like the laser retinal scanners from 10-15 years ago. And that's a good thing.
I got to try one of the laser retinal scanners at SIGGRAPH ages ago. I was pretty excited, because they promised to dodge the corrective-lenses issue -- in effect, it's as though you're stopping the eye down to a microscopic aperture, which means focus and aberration issues become arbitrarily small. The problem, though, was diffraction artifacts, and they were overwhelming -- there were big, heavily-fringed blobs at fixed positions in the image, and you couldn't make them go away.
Laser technology has come a long way since then, but it doesn't matter. As far as I know, there's nothing that technology can do to overcome this fundamental flaw.
Surely you don't want any *artificial* light that those other HMDs offer.
(My BS meter was pegging out while watching that video.)
It's not made clear in the article, but this looks identical in principle to a conventional digital projector (i.e. powerpoint and home cinema). It's a rather daft article in places; e.g. of course the device has pixels. They're just not RGB triplets. The micro-mirrors must surely be these sorts of things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_micromirror_device which are a standard DLP part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing Instead of a white screen, they're projecting onto the retina directly. It's a nice idea but I'm not clear on the benefits and the article doesn't seem to say anything concrete in this regard. There may be downsides: For one thing, the RGB cycling of the LED can lead to rainbow effects when you sacade across the display. The DLPs I'm familiar with have this, at any rate. Perhaps an RGB LED is fast enough to avoid this, though.
soylentnews.org
Let's see if we can clear up a few things. Imagine looking at your monitor.
The pixel in the upper left corner is emitting a hemisphere of light. Or rather, it's emitting a bunch of rays of light that spread out in a hemisphere. Under ideal circumstances, it's the same color and intensity for any of those rays, though we know from experience that it tapers off and sometimes changes color as you see it from greater angles. But for most of the "straight on" angles, they're about the same.
A subset of that hemisphere of rays is entering one of your pupils. If you consider the shape of that subset, it forms a cone, with the base at that pixel on the monitor, and the extent formed by the circle of the pupil. All those rays of light will (assuming your eye is focused on the monitor) focus to a point on the associated retina.
The individual rays in that cone are close to, but not quite, parallel to each other. The farther away your monitor is, the more parallel they are, and the closer the monitor is to you, the more the rays are spreading out. Each eye's lens takes care of focusing the parallel or spreading out rays back to a point on its retina. Note that if the rays are spreading out too much (ie, the monitor is too close to your face), you cannot refocus the rays back to a point. You'd need additional optics to help achieve this. (This is why Oculus needs a big fat lens in front of each screen.)
For the purposes of this explanation, we'll simplify a bit and consider a bundle of rays that are parallel. Given this simplification, the only distinction between the pixels on the monitor (aside from their color and intensity) is that they arrive at your pupil from different directions.
In fact, you can replace the monitor with physical objects that are reflecting light, and the same principles apply. Going a step further, you can see that it doesn't really matter how those bundles of rays are generated; the only thing that matters is how they enter the pupil. The direction (ie, angle) that they enter from determines the location, and the color and intensity determine what you see there.
So let's take away the monitor, and instead imagine other ways that you can generate different parallel ray bundles directed at your pupil. The original "virtual retinal display" from the University of Washington was based on the following principle:
1) Generate a single collimated beam of light rays. Collimated means that all the rays within the beam are parallel (or close to it). Beam, in this case, does not mean a tiny dot, but rather a beam with some girth to it (on the order of a centimeter).
2) Use one or more tiltable mirrors to shine this beam at different angles at your pupil. By redirecting the beam in a raster-scan fashion, you can trace out a complete image.
3) For each different direction scanned (ie, each pixel), you also need to change the color and intensity of the beam appropriately (to correspond to the pixel you see from that direction).
Note that the beam has to be spread out significantly from a single point, such that when redirecting it from one extreme to other that it will still hit your pupil. Light that doesn't enter your pupil is wasted.
This is just one method. The subject of today's article appears to use a DMD array instead of one or two scanning mirrors. Assuming that the DMD mirrors can scan in a 2D fashion, then it's really the exact sample principle.
Note that there are many other ways to achieve the same ends. If you have a point light source, you could use a parabolic mirror to generate a large collimated beam. Provide some way to scan that beam, and voila. You might also note that spherical mirrors approximate a parabola, except for arbitrary directions. Provide a way to scan the light source, and voila.
As you can see, the trick is mainly in the scanning, since all the rest is "easy".
Now if they could just add a camera and project the realworld image onto your eye! it would be like, like, like vision.
The Phrase "shut up and take my money" was made for this technology.
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
I've avoided "monitors on eyeglasses" for a while, feeling the technology still a bit weak, but damn am I ready to just turn on my direct-to-eye virtual system.
We're turning the corner, kids. I can't wait to see what's down the block.
Pardon me for being cynical, but what if what's down the block is that these become mandatory and always-on? Naturally enough the authorities will have overrides...
"No Citizen, those five officers are not beating the crap out of that $UNPOPULAR_MINORITY person over there. Look again - see, they are all handing him kittens..."
I'm not saying the tech will be in place tomorrow, but progress is fast and how many politicians can you think of who wouldn't use it, given the power?