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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.
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.
Well, you could always blink, or just close your eyes.
It sounds to me like you're worried that the developers understand the technology as little as you do.
No, images arrive at our retina through means the human body has been using for thousands of years.
Having a piece of technology draw it directly onto your retina is different. And anybody who has ever seen screen burn-in on a monitor will know why it's different.
It's no different at all though. In everyday natural means, light passes through the eyeball to arrive at the retina. In this display, it also passes through the eyeball to arrive at the retina. Naturally, our pupils adjust to allow a comfortable amount of light through. That doesn't change here, either - the pupil can still adjust to suit the viewer's preference.
If too much natural light gets through the pupil, we instinctively blink or squint to avoid burning. That only fails when the viewer intentionally keeps their eyes open (such as kids staring at the sun), when too much energy gets through in the time it takes to execute the blink (such as powerful lasers), or when the energy being absorbed is outside the range of human perception (IR or UV damage).
Fortunately, we actually have a pretty good idea of how much energy is required to burn the retina, and we can easily make LEDs that stay under that threshold. Since the wavelength of an LED is uniform, there's very little risk of any IR or UV damage, as well.
The biggest hazard to this thing is that some idiot might try to wear it while walking, and be hit by a car. That proves that walking is horribly dangerous compared to safer alternatives like being inside the car, even though feet are the locomotive means the human body has been using for thousands of years.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
...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.