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From: Joel Dubiner <jdubiner@well.com>
To: wearables@media.mit.edu
Subject: Microvision's Virtual Retinal Display
Date: Thu, 06 Mar 1997 11:10:52 -0800
FORGET COMPUTER SCREENS. JACK IN YOUR EYEBALLS
(Wired News)
Todd McIntyre has seen the computer screen of tomorrow, and it closely
resembles the human body - or at least a very small part of it. "You
already have a high performance screen, it's called the retina," said
McIntyre, vice president of business development for Seattle-based
Microvision. Microvision's Virtual Retinal Display (VRD), demonstrated
Tuesday at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference in
San Jose, would replace the computer screen with the human retina and
use colors to generate its images. It would be used in personal display
systems - whether mounted on glasses, in a headset, or in a standalone
device - and draw on the tissue's natural ability to process images. The
human eye is adept at filling in information as it scans along a picture
or line of text. All one needs is to be shown the way a picture or
sentence is headed to fill in the rest, said McIntyre. For example, if a
person sits in a dark room shining a flashlight up at the ceiling, he or
she will see only the one spot of light. But move the light rapidly back
and forth across the ceiling, and the eyes can fill in the other parts
and "see" the whole ceiling, McIntyre said. A VRD works similarly,
except that a hand-held or head-mounted device contains the scanners
that draw the image on the retina. These scans travel through
oscillating mirrors which direct the beam through the iris and onto the
retina, where the eye constructs the image. The VRD scans at a rate of
18 million pixels per second, and a "screen" is refreshed at a rate of
60 times per second. The resulting image, projected through a device
that is close to the eye, appears at arm's length in VGA resolution (640
by 480 pixels). Although Tuesday's demonstration was in black and white,
McIntyre said the VRD will present more of the color spectrum than
current cathode-ray tube and liquid crystal digital technology. McIntyre
said the VRD will likely see use in military applications - in planes
and on helmet-mounted devices to help keep troops informed on their
fellow soldiers' positions, of emergencies, and of their own locations.
It will certainly lead to smaller computers - devices small enough to
fit into a cellular phone to allow people to view documents, an activity
that isn't currently possible with LCD screens, he said. The problem
with miniaturization of display systems, said McIntyre, is that LCD is
not energy efficient because of the back-lighting used. It gets harder
to read when the screen gets smaller. By contrast, the VRD uses a few
nanowatts of power, so small that scientific instruments cannot measure
it. For those who might see personal display devices as another screen
that will cause severe strain on the eye, McIntyre described the VRD's
light intensity level as a comfortable level. The VRD generates light
that is 10,000 to 100,000 times below the ANSI threshold for exposure to
visible light. "[Fear of lasers in the eye] is more of a perception
issue," said McIntyre. "When people intuit how this will work just like
the retina processes light, they'll accept it.
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