The Smallest Large Display is Projected Straight Onto Your Retina
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
For most of human history, the way to get custom shapes and colors onto one's retinas was to draw it on a cave wall, or a piece of parchment, or on paper. Later on, we invented electronic displays and used them for everything from televisions to computers, even toying with displays that gave the illusion of a 3D shape existing in front of us. Yet what if one could just skip this surface and draw directly onto our retinas?
Admittedly, the thought of aiming lasers directly at the layer of cells at the back of our eyeballs - the delicate organs which allow us to see - likely does not give one the same response as you'd have when thinking of sitting in front of a 4K, 27"^3 gaming display to look at the same content. Yet effectively we'd have the same photons painting the same image on our retinas. And what if it could be an 8K display, cinema-sized. Or maybe have a HUD overlay instead, like in video games?
In many ways, this concept of virtual retinal displays as they are called is almost too much like science-fiction, and yet it's been the subject of decades of research, with increasingly more sophisticated technologies making it closer to an every day reality. Will we be ditching our displays and TVs for this technology any time soon?
[...] Naturally, the very first question that may come to one's mind when hearing about VDRs is why it's suddenly okay to shine not one but three lasers into your eyes? After all, we have been told to never, not even once, point even the equivalent of a low-powered laser pointer at a person, let alone straight at their eyes. Some may remember the 2014 incident at the Burning Man festival where festival goers practically destroyed the sight of a staff member with handheld lasers.
The answer to these concerns is that very low-powered lasers are used. Enough to draw the images, not enough to do more than cause the usual wear and tear from using one's eyes to perceive the world around us. As the light is projected straight onto the retina, there is no image that can become washed out in bright sunlight. Companies like Bosch have prototypes of VRD glasses, with the latter recently showing off their BML500P Bosch Smartglasses Light Drive solution. They claim an optical output power of <15 W.
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