Retinal Imaging Display to be Available in 2010? Thursday, Sep 17 2009
futurism and technology 7:25 pm
Announced April 11th, 2008:
Brother Industries, Ltd. (president: Toshikazu Koike) has announced that it has successfully developed a prototype spectacle-type wearable retinal imaging display (RID), which is significantly smaller than the previous prototype. Brother is actively developing technologies for retinal imaging displays, such as creating an attraction for EXPO 2005 Aichi, Japan whereby visitors could view images through a head-mounted RID.
This is interesting. I’ve been following retinal display technology for a while and I thought it was sort of stagnant. Wish I had seen this when I was writing my augmented reality article for h+ magazine. Here’s a conceptual drawing of seeing a virtual object through the eyepiece:
H/t Next Big Future.
In order for this to take off, you need more than the ability to display 3D, hi-rez images onto the retina. You need more than miniaturized components etched onto contact lenses.
The military uses technology like this know, but it requires that they actually type commands into a wrist device or use a thumb-mouse mounted on their body armor. That’s too clunky.
You need a workable GUI. Whoever comes out with the best, most elegant GUI (see the iPod touch screen example for the last generation “GUI breakthrough”) will I think take the lead in this tech.
Combine this with haptics, and handheld devices are history. Which is why I think we need to pay more attention to haptics than the actual display technology. Display is easy.