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Dual Perspectives
Wired Ars Technica: The Art of Technology See Archive ›
Future of the Screen: Terminator-Style Augmented-Reality
Glasses
By Douglas Wolk | 09.02.09
The most efficient possible display technology would be something that bypasses the eyes
altogether and sends information straight to the brain. Sadly, cranial USB ports are still pretty
hard to install. The second most efficient possible display technology anyone's devised projects
images directly into the eye. The dream of a wearable virtual retinal display, or VRD, has been
around for nearly two decades; it's on the horizon, but it's still going to be a while until it gets
here.

The idea of VRD was first tossed around at the University of Washington's Human Interface
Technology Lab back around 1991. Thomas Furness, who'd been working on helmet-based
displays for the Air Force in the '80s, and research engineer Joel Kollin were part of the team that
put together the initial (and enormous) prototype. The concept was that tiny, ultra-low-power
lasers could paint an image onto the human retina by scanning across it at high speed, essentially
treating it as a tiny TV screen. If you could assemble a set of microscopic red, blue and green
lasers, stick them where they could project onto your eyes, and hook them up to a computer, you
could still see whatever you'd normally see, but with three-dimensional, full-color displays of
additional information or imagery overlaid on the visible world—an effect called "augmented
reality." Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger's sunglasses in Terminator, and you're on the right
track.

Prof. Steven Feiner, of Columbia University's computer science department, notes that the
potential advantages of retinal displays are energy-efficiency and unobtrusiveness: "What many
of us want is something you're always wearing so that you can experience overlaid stuff, as
opposed to having to put something on." There is clearly some money to be made with
augmented reality, and a Seattle-area company called Microvision has been working on
commercial applications of the HITLab's VRD concepts since the early '90s. (More recently, the
Japanese printer company Brother Industries has been developing a similar technology, which it
calls "retinal imaging display.") The military has paid Microvision to research VRD eyewear for
soldiers and pilots, who need to have a lot of information instantly accessible in addition to
what's in front of their eyes.
But there are plenty of day-to-day civilian uses for an unobtrusive, full-color "heads-up" display
—one that wouldn't require looking away from its users' physical, nonvirtual surroundings. A
mobile phone could have a "screen" as large as its user's visual field. Driving directions could
appear in front of your eyes while you're looking at the road, even in bright daylight. Cooking
wouldn't require shuttling your attention between the stove and a cookbook. Hearing-impaired
people could see voice-recognition transcriptions of what people around them were saying.
Surgeons could keep watch on their patients' vital signs and medical reference texts without
looking away from an operation.

So where are your Terminator shades? In 1992, Furness and Kollin claimed that it would be at
least five years until full-on VRD was a reality, and it's been considerably more than that. One
problem is that people's eyes don't stand still—in practice, projecting an image onto a retina is
like trying to project a movie onto a moving screen. Another is that, while the wearable part of
the system may be small, the gear that needs to be hooked up to it is still gigantic; if it's not
portable, it's not very useful.

Still, Dr. Bruce H. Thomas, the director of the Wearable Computer Lab at the University of
South Australia, believes that "in the near future we might actually see head-mounted displays
become consumer products because of iPods—a legitimate video delivery unit that lots of people
carry around with them." In the meantime, primitive VRD has begun to appear in the real world.
Microvision released the Nomad Expert Technician System in 2004. (It cost $4,000 a unit and
only projected images in red; Honda ordered some for their training centers, but the NETS never
caught on, and was discontinued by 2006.) And Brother announced last year that it was hoping to
make their retinal imaging display device commercially available sometime in 2010. Maybe by
then it'll be small enough for a non-Schwarzenegger-sized person to carry around.