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Demo of Prototype Virtual Retinal Head Mounted Display

Posted by Unknown on from the could-use-a-few-lasers dept.

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.'"

3 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. pretty epic by Xicor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    i think this might completely overwhelm the occulus rift. the fact that it can be adjusted to your eyesight is pretty awesome as well.

  2. Do want... by mythosaz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Yeah, it looks like "Retinal" is misleading... by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...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.