Direct retinal projection display for smart glasses using a meta-optic mirror

Neat, but hardly a world first (the original title said "...the world’s first direct retinal projection display...")

I first read about direct retinal projection displays (using oscillating mirrors no less) in Mondo 2000 [^1]

Hard to find much on the "Private Eye" hardware as I guess Reflection Technology (the manufacturer) went outta business in the mid 90's

But a 700x280 display painted onto your retina that looked like a full-ish size display hovering in space nonetheless, and downright epic for 1989

[^1]: https://microship.com/winnelife-interview-with-steve-roberts...

For the curious, a bit more info and some pics on these sites

https://glassdevelopment.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/hmd-histor...

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/reflection-technolog...

I wrote a short story years ago about a tech CEO going to trial over a similar technology that turned out to mass-blind people. Just food for thought I guess.

I have a quite badly displaced retina due to a detachment. I wonder if technology like this could be used in conjunction with mapping the distorted retina in order to obtain a correct perceived image.

I know "what does it look like" is open to mis-interpretation, but I think all of us would like something approximating to artwork which shows what you as a wearer "see" through this mechanism.

I don't worry about the fashion sense of the frames and lenses: I wan't to understand the perceptual effect on reality: Whats the overlay like?

This looks strikingly similar to my 2017/20 patent:

https://kemendo.com/pdfs/USPatent10757400.pdf

Pretty much all my patents are being infringed at this point.

Lesson to anyone getting patents, they don’t matter unless you have $100M to fight Microsoft or oracle with. At that point might as well just keep your 100M and forget it

this is cool tech, but I don't think display glasses will fully take off until head tracking/movement compensation is built-in (AR feature)

otherwise even just walking around causes the content to bounce around annoyingly

"The current meta-optic mirror supports monochrome operation."

I would love monochromatic vector(not raster) HUD in my glasses. I could play the original Asteroids. Bah, bah, bah bah. Pew, pew!

Snowcrash here we go! ;)

Isn’t this dangerous for the eyes?

That's so cool finally actually glasses instead of sunglasses!

played with one of these 'retinal displays' back in the late 90s at the university of washington. Pretty crazy stuff, apparently some guy with massive cornea damage was able to see the retinal projection clearly. At the time it was just monochrome and fairly low resolution (by todays standards) but very exciting.

TLDR: They demoed a direct retinal projection display with a thin, transparent mirror embedded in the lens, enabling glasses that look more like everyday eyewear while reducing costs compared with waveguide-based designs.

This Japanese article has a few more details: https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/2145266.html