Companies To Invade Your Retinas As Soon As Next Year? 245
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."
Finally I could run for political office (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Obligatory joke (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Obligatory joke (Score:4, Interesting)
Many people shy away from laser eye surgery - I can imagine this device will be a bit difficult to market. Imagine the "phosphor burn" effect on your retina.... not pretty. My bet is that this won't appear in the lawsuit-happy USA any day soon.
Re:A Little Bit Backwards? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wouldn't it make more sense to display subtitles as someone talks to you?
I can't speak for others, but I've had enough foot-in-mouth moments that maybe seeing what I currently am saying might help on occasion.
And a 2 second lead time would be even better.
First Person Shooters (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Obligatory joke (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Prototype in article doesn't seem very practica (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:Obligatory joke (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Phew! Good thing I have eyelids. Never leave home without 'em!
Re:Obligatory joke (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm no biologist... (Score:2, Interesting)
A CRT also has "no real equivalent to the image." It's just a scanned electron beam that lights up an area of phosphor for a small fraction of a second. Any image you see is just the result of light from multiple directions (the area of the image) entering your eyes within a small window of time.
Also, no practical HMDs use just a point light source scanned over the retina, since this results in a "eye box" that's much too small. The eye box is the volume of space that your pupil must be in in order to see the image. In order to be practical, a scanned point light source needs to pass through a beam spreader of some sort in order to enlarge the eye box. It's difficult to make an HMD with both a large eye box and a large FOV. (It's actually difficult to make an HMD with a big FOV period.)
As far as safety goes, there are typically several levels of fail-safes built into laser-scanned displays, including a "dead man's switch" which cuts power to the lasers if the scanner stops scanning. Hopefully, no manufacturer is stupid enough to depend upon software alone to control the laser power.
Re:oblig (Score:3, Interesting)
No thanks ... you can have my eyeballs when you pry them from my cold dead skull.
Besides, can you imagine the product liability lawsuits from accidents? "He didn't see where he was going because he was looking at where he was going" will actually parse. That's just fucked up!