Virtual Retinal Displays are a pretty old idea, first being demonstrated in 1991. They've been stuck in development for years, so it's good to see them getting some more attention.
That was me. It’s great to see that the light engine and electronics have been miniaturized to be almost glasses sized. It’s annoying that they are still stuck with the tiny exit pupil I saw in 2012 and HITLab had in the 90’s. I hoped that mass producible pupil replicators would have been ubiquitous by now.
Surely its a fairly straightforward control system alá quad copters. Just got to solve fuel and health and safety regulations and we’re set. Boris and Donald working on the latter, hopefully Elon can get the ball rolling with a 3D mockup of the former.
I don't see how they can hope to overcome the alignment issue. This idea has been prototyped before, iirc carmack built a simple one during very early development of the Oculus.
I am confused that it "paints images directly onto your retina" (presumably, shooting lasers at your eyeball, which sounds unhealthy) and yet the writer was able to take a picture of the image on the glass.
The image is being painted onto the camera sensor instead of the retina.
Regarding "shooting lasers at your eyeball, which sounds unhealthy", this technology has existed since at least the early '00s. Microvision was showing off their Nomad laser HMD (https://www.google.com/search?q=microvision+nomad) around 2002 IIRC. It's reasonably well established as safe.
Maybe this will be the exception, but in general these seem so consumer focused as to be useless. I just want something that can accept some standardized or ad hoc well-documented protocol to do basic raster images or text or something as a baseline. I want something that application developers (and people like myself) can start to hack on and explore where it can go.
I know, I want to put these in ski goggles and wire up Google's maps for ski resorts, the ski resort's lift line times data, and apres ski events info, and the current and upcoming weather conditions.
I think AR is more suited to commercial users than consumers anyway. Google Glass and Microsoft's AR solution seem to be playing out that way.
Anecdotally, the only context I would want information beamed right into my line of sight is in work scenarios. All other scenarios I want technology to be in the background as much as possible.
I don't see the AR applications even being the most interesting part of this. A private facial recognition database coupled with "this person's name and a note to self" would be immensely helpful in a lot of situations -- I have bad facial recognition (not full on face-blindness, but inconvenient) and it would be neat to be able to hack on this a little bit. This would also require a camera of some sort, but I'd rather have that not be integrated.
Possibly even "real-world closed captions".
A tap for clock/calendar function would be handy.
Morse code (or other silent, maybe subvocal?) "telepathy" would be interesting as well.
I don't know how convenient or awful these would be in reality, but if the cost were not exorbitant and you weren't locked into a proprietary app ecosphere then it definitely seems like it would be worth a shot.
Naturally, I worry about all of this facial recognition and data gathering; however, as a k12 teacher, the utility of displaying names/data about my students is immediately apparent. A great deal of time/effort is expended on assessing my students and modifying my interactions with them based on that information.
My main fear here is using any sort of centralized/cloud system for any portion of this. Facial recognition against a small corpus can be done fairly easily off the shelf.
Everyone wants to sell me something at a huge discount because they know that the enhancements to their own database will pay for the difference. I just want the basic version of this for my own personal use, preferably with no online use at all short of maybe encrypted backups (maybe).
I think the current uses are mostly commercial because that where you can get enough money to make a bespoke application and people aren't as sensitive about how things look. For a consumer AR application you need a lot more value to overcome how bad these things currently look and building that data out for the world is expensive.
Yes. So much this. I really just want a super low level API to paint monochrome vectors onto my retina. That's it. I don't want any cruft. I really really hope someone takes the *nix approach to a glasses-hud. I want the hardware to track where my retina is, paint it with a stream of vectors over bluetooth, and have strong hardware guarantees for my ocular safety. Maybe toss one of those nice Bosch IMUs in it as well.
Seems like this technology, when developed further, could be the sort of thing that https://www.skully.com/ was trying with their original prototype, which was really exciting to me at the time.
Fighter pilots already have helmet mounted displays to project information to the pilot's eyes. These systems can also cue weapons systems to the direction the pilot is looking.
Very cool. I was super interested in Intel Vaunt and this is just an iterative improvement. I would buy a pair of these if they had a reasonably open API/firmware.
From my understanding it's just for reflecting the laser light. The lasers are shining parallel to the lens surface initially and thus need to be redirected towards the pupil, this is done with a film.
IEEE's coverage way back in 2003 and even by then a prototype existed as far back as 91.
I've been waiting for people to circle back around to this type of display for about a 2 decades now. I suspect the biggest barrier/reason is aversion to liability and safety of beaming lasers directly into customer eyes.
Lasers have been used routinely to measure the eye for the last 20 years. And everyone making that technology probably toyed with the idea of making a display rather than a sensor because you deal with the same issues. My guess is it has been prophetic patents holding progress back, so hopefully they are starting to expire now.
I disagree, the biggest barrier to commercialization of this technology is that it's technically infeasible. For the projection to make it through your pupil onto the retina your eye needs to be carefully aligned with the projection beam. This just barely works indoors when you pupil is hugely dilated, now imagine being outside when your pupil is contracted. It's a non-starter.
Me too! Elsewhere in the thread I brought up the HIT Lab that patented the approach in the 90s. I've been waiting for it to come out of patent / become adopted for decades:
If the lasers are low-powered enough it should be just the same as looking at a screen, shouldn't it? Either way the same amount of photons are hitting your retina, with a laser they are just aimed more carefully.
I'm mostly in agreement with you, but the part that gives me concern is precisely how precisely the lasers will be aimed at the retina. I doubt anyone ever really looks at a screen in the exact same place (even if you are staring at a specific character) due to eye jitter. After a year or twenty of use are we going to start having burn-in on our retina's similar to plasma screens used as kiosks?
With lasers, the photons are collimated, so they're all going almost exactly the same direction, instead of just being scattered like with normal light sources. Because of this, it doesn't take that much laser power in your eye for your lens to focus it down to a small patch on your retina and burn holes in it. So you'll need very low-powered lasers for this to be safe. But it certainly should be possible.
Lasers are effectively point light sources.
We usually think of them as perfectly collimated light, but that's just a special case, where the point is at infinity.
The consequence of being a point light source is that lenses can refocus the beam, parallel or not, back into a point. Doing so concentrates a lot of energy on a tiny surface. And if that surface is your retina, then that when it becomes dangerous, literally burning a tiny hole into it.
It can never happen with, say, a regular light bulb, or even the sun. It the light source is spread out, the image on your retina, or anywhere else, will be spread out, limiting the energy density. This is an indirect consequence of the second law of thermodynamics called the conservation of etendue.
You can go blind looking at the sun or any high powered light source for long enough. If the laser is at a low enough power, then this is no different than looking at any reflected light. The damage is due to the energy density so you just lower the energy.
Photons do not get a special "laser" tag added to them by physics. If it's all in the visual wavelengths and at intensities below what we experience every day (sunlight is really bright, our eyes hide from us the number of orders of magnitude difference between even normal night-time artificial light and sunlight), there's no issue.
(However... since I often see this sorta misinterpreted in the wild on the internet, note that is an if-then statement. If the antecedent is false, I make no claim.)
The primary safety concern I have would be met by designing the lasers such that if they are overdriven for any reason, they will physically burn out before outputting enough light to be dangerous. Per the classic Therac-25 [1] case study though, that is one safety feature I absolutely want in hardware. There is no amount of software I would accept to implement that.
I would also additionally stick some fuses into the system, tuned below the threshold where the power will burn out the laser, along with of course building the whole battery system to not be able to deliver enough power to power the lasers to a dangerous level. However, I really want excess power to physically burn out the lasers. (I wouldn't want to find out the hard way that an EMP of some sort can overdrive the lasers.)
For all that I'm laying out safety systems here, I am quite confident that it could be done safely. We trust our lives to much more dangerous systems all the time. I will say that I can't explain to you how you'd audit that safety, though.
> Photons do not get a special "laser" tag added to them by physics.
True, but we usually get a pretty wide spread of light energies. These are likely going to be very specific frequencies, hitting similar areas over and over. I wonder if the retina can get fatigued of specific frequencies.
A reasonable question, but I suspect we'd already have some idea if this was the case. There's a lot of artificial light with relatively few, narrow frequencies already in use. I imagine someone, somewhere in some bizarre application would have discovered this as a problem.
Since we only see in three color dimensions, it's hard for us to notice day-to-day, but for instance, some fluorescent bulbs are just 5 spikes in particular frequencies. It looks fairly "white" to us, but it's far from normal light.
(I am interpreting your comment as being fatigued of/damaged by very specific frequencies in a way that it would not be fatigued/damaged for the same amount of energy spread out over a wider range still within the given cone's sensitivity range.)
> (I am interpreting your comment as being fatigued of/damaged by very specific frequencies in a way that it would not be fatigued/damaged for the same amount of energy spread out over a wider range still within the given cone's sensitivity range.)
Yep, that's my concern. I don't know if anyone's done long-term studies about low-level light of identical wavelength.
I mean, on the one hand, people used to be afraid of fast-moving vehicles, convinced that it was impossible for a human body to survive going faster than 40 miles per hour.
But on the other hand, people used to strap radium to their faces because they thought it was a cure-all, too.
>Photons do not get a special "laser" tag added to them by physics.
I thought they kinda did. By being very similar wavelength and power, compared to normal light which has all sorts of wave lengths and power. This difference can mean certain rods/cones being stressed more than average and not triggering the sort of fatigue that normal light would cause.
Perhaps the best example of a similar concept, though not with lasers, is looking at a total solar eclipse right before or after the sun is fully eclipsed. There is a small period of time where extremely bright light makes it into our eyes, but not he frequencies that cause pain normally associated with looking at the sun. This means that our default defenses against looking at the sun don't kick in and doing permanent eye damage is extremely easy without feeling any pain as the damage is done.
till you can of course (well maybe not us, but I see it quite realistically for our children, with some perks like taking pictures, better seeing in the dark, maybe infra, zoom)
If the projected technology trends of the past have taught us anything, we can't make assumptions on anything we'll be getting. For all we know it'll be a hundred years and we'll never crack that tech, but boy will we get better cellphones.
Start of the article: "My priority at CES every year is to find futuristic new technology that I can get excited about. But even at a tech show as large as CES, this can be surprisingly difficult. If I’m very lucky [...]"
End of the article: "Bosch covered our costs for attending CES 2020."
Well working is a qualifier that you added, not the author. Maybe he's only interested in things that explore innovative ideas rather than a functional product.
Also: "After making a minor nuisance of myself, Bosch agreed to give me a private demo"
I mean it's possible they paid for him (and others) and still didn't allow him to get a demo... but it's unlikely. Also, I feel like IEEE can afford to pay the attendance costs for a reporter.
So, this is really just promoted content/an ad.
Which is fine and it's even fine to wait until the end to tell us I think but not if the article body tries to paint a different, organic picture. This wasn't at all necessary for the content but simply there to detract from the paid promo nature of the piece.
I wondered this myself but I searched the IEEE website and it appears that there are several stories about various Bosch technologies so it is possible that Bosch was expecting this writer to cover their other stuff and wasn't planning to demo this particular item. Given that Bosch is looking for a commercial partner and not to sell direct to the public they might have had the glasses to show to possible partners and not reporters.
I don't know if the article was edited, but this is what the article now shows at the end:
> Robert Bosch LLC provided travel support for us to attend CES 2020. Bosch Sensortec, responsible for the Smartglasses Light Drive, was not aware of nor involved with the travel support.
So it seems like you are correct. The article could have been much more clear about this though.
I don't think the new text changes anything, though. a) If that new text tries to paint the picture that this isn't sponsored content or might have bias, then why did they even mention that disclaimer? b) Which exact legal entity or subsidiary was "officially" sponsoring the trip isn't really that relevant when they are so tightly connected in brand and organizationally.
They could have simply started the article with: "This year Bosch invited us to CES fully covering our attendance cost."
or alternatively later on "while Bosch sponsored our trip we still had a really hard time getting a demo for ... because of ..." (e.g. too many people)
"We don't want this getting out just yet, but... oh okay, you can come behind the curtain just this once."
<end of private demo>
"So, what'dya think? By the way, here's a fresh marketing video we happen to have lying around. Tell everyone. No no, actually, let us pay you to tell everyone. We insist."
Yeah, that's a big no-no for credibility. At least for me, I have to trust a stranger before I could ever convert on a pitch, and stating any financial obligations or fiduciary duties or conflicts of interest upfront or early on is far better than tacking it on later.
Case in point, I'm not even going to read this article after reading this comment.
I don't understand your implication. Are you saying that an unaffiliated writer who is sponsored one time by Bosch wouldn't have an inclination of positive bias towards his financial benefactor, as opposed to a PR / marketing person on staff?
>Robert Bosch LLC provided travel support for us to attend CES 2020. Bosch Sensortec, responsible for the Smartglasses Light Drive, was not aware of nor involved with the travel support.
Holy shit. The parent comment is as disingenuous as the implication they’re putting the author of the article. It earned a very rare HN downvote from me.
Thank you! I tried using internet archive but somehow it wasn't loading the page properly. I was going a bit insane, but remembered it's just the internet and moved on.
I quoted what was on the page when I read it. They changed it at least twice, the last time I checked it said something about Bosch Sensortec, and I had to Google it to see if they were related to the glasses. They since apparently added that in as well.
Social ticks such as frantically tapping the side of your head, will be normal when someone tries to "remember" your name. I thought it was weird when people were talking to themselves with bluetooth on or walking into a street sign when looking down at their phone...but it's just going to get stranger. I could easily imagine eye flickering or eye rolling when your brain OS is rebooting. These glasses and also the contact lenses in the works will make us forget having to worry about things we take for granted today just as your phones helped us forget peoples' phone numbers or care about knowing how to get somewhere as the new devices will be contextually aware of facts we need to know that will just appear as an overlay...no more "let me look it up on google". If it's coupled with audio, gps and other inputs, it could be even more proactive in finding things before you even knew you needed them.
I'm sure we'll develop sensitive clothing, body feedback and other forms of haptic interfaces - a tap on the side of the glasses might not be necessary if you can train your AR to respond to say, snapping fingers or tapping feet.
The thing I hate about this trend is that we seem to love to forego a vital part of interfaces in the process: visibility. I don't know why designers seem to hate buttons, but it's really annoying.
It has to be more than that. A touch sensor might be cheaper than a button, but even Software UI distances itself from the button visual of the 90s and 00s, instead opting for icons with no discernible background or button association. Software UI design is very much imitating how a physical touch sensor interface looks. It seems to be the current trend, chasing a "clean" design above all else.
I miss switches. Big metal toggle switches with labeled positions. These tiny hall effect buttons that barely give any feedback are the worst of both worlds. They have no visible status. The tactile element isn't much better than a touchscreen, and they break. Toggles!
Buttons aren't visible if they're on the side of your head. I have headphones with about 5 buttons. I can often successfully use the volume and power ones if I locate them correctly, but there are another two next to those that I sometimes end up pressing instead.
I should have been more clear: those buttons are still "visible" in that they have a haptic interface. I have a headphone with "tap to play/pause, swipe to change songs or volume" - it's impossible to know without reading the manual or triggering one of these actions by accident. Which incidentally also happens a lot.
That's bad interface design IMO. I guess the headphones look "cleaner" but it's really annoying in practice and not worth it.
Those are crappy buttons. Good buttons are ones that you don't need your eyes. Take an xbox controller. Every button on the device is labelled and there is a schematic detailing every aspect of their function in every game, however you never look down at the controller because you can discern every single button on the controller by feel alone.
Can you write C? Do with it what you like. I'll make a javascript framework that runs on a smartphone too. (Nordic Bluetooth LE chip, microphone, speaker, 12 RGB LEDs, gyro/accelerometer, battery that should last weeks). Internet connected walkie-talkie, translator, study languages (like this: https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?t=8699).
I'll make more devices soon, and will sell them for $25. Send me an email, and I'll message when they are ready (mail in profile).
Love it! Sadly, my self-insight has reached the level where I know I would buy it then never use it after tinkering for a few hours, so I'm afraid I have to pass on ordering one.. but I really like the concept!
I'm not sure how it can get stranger. I've had guys come up to the urinal next to me still talking into their ear pieces. It's incredibly rude, bizarre behavior. Their conversation is taking place in an entirely different context, and I think that's where their minds usually are too. So they might not think anything of it when they approach from behind saying something like, "We need to take care of this right now" too loud and too close to your ear.
When that happens to me, I make sure to let the person on the other side of that conversation know where it's being held.
I flush repeatedly, turn on the water, and take out my phone and have very loud imaginary phone calls, or just cycle through the available ringtones at high volume.
Some people are still so low class that it doesn't even phase them.
Hmm, you can also try to pretend you have one on yourself and laugh joker-style looking up then talking to the ceiling, making sure the volume of your voice was uncomfortably loud and inappropriate for the setting you are in. Its not like that person can call you rude and it will give you some satisfaction that you have interrupted their call. Maybe they will self reflect at some point realizing how rude they are themselves. IDK.
It seems rude in most contexts, to just shove your conversation into everyone else's life. Unless it's a real emergency, I don't get how people think it's okay.
I think a lot of people don't realize that a lot of people consider it a luxury to be out of contact for periods of time.
I have a bluetooth "joystick" which is so small it uses a ring so that I can hold it. No reason not to improve that. The interface for your walking-around glasses can be a thick ring that you rub and click with your thumb.
This is how Focals by North [0] work. Everyone I’ve asked about it has thought it’s a silly idea (to have to wear a ring), but I still can’t think of a better interface.
I assure you, the combination of a stand that holds a tablet over my bed and the bluetooth joystick ring is the most comfortable possible bedtime reading scenario.
Amazon is full of them. I got a generic steel gooseneck with a clamp that attaches pretty well to my steel-pipe headboard, and I zip-tie it at a second point. My wife got a floor-standing gooseneck to hold her Chromebook, and added a 20Kg steel weight at the bottom to keep it upright.
I already can't stand talking to people who have those air pods in or are looking at screens. I don't know if social norms around this will change or not, but I hope they don't. No one can have a straight conversation with someone distracted by other stuff. Even if that person has no music on, it still feels as though he's elsewhere.
That is a great point about distraction and not feeling as though you truly are a focal point. It will get very odd if something like neuralink comes into play where the person just gets ideas as if it was their own while they are talking to you, then you will never know if they are actually thinking for themselves at all either on top of not paying you full attention. But if you are a parent with a teenager, you'll kind of already feel this way.
Calling AirPods “those air pods”, but also having something as “young” as “big_chungus” as your username... I’m having a hard time figuring out your age!
Judging by the (upper)middle class kids I work with, the social stigma around wearing earbuds while holding a conversation is clearly on the way out. It seems like a rapid social shift (which makes me old at 34, I guess) and is probably an “important” change for those who want to sell us on the AR future.
To that end, my experience of using transparency mode on AirPod Pro earbuds is that they very much do “become invisible” while allowing me to overlay (auditory) information on the world around me. If they were built to be as inconspicuous as my father’s hearing aids, nobody would know the difference and no overt social stigma would persist. The AR future of today is auditory.
I thought it was weird when people were talking to themselves with bluetooth
When Bluetooth headsets became small enough to be inconspicuous I lived in a marginal neighborhood. When my wife and I would go out, we'd play a guessing game called "Bluetooth or mental illness."
I play a game with people talking on their BT device, where I pretend I don't already know that, and I talk back to them as if they're talking to me. The object of the game is to see how long I can keep them from their other conversation by refusing to acknowledge their device.
> I could easily imagine eye flickering or eye rolling when your brain OS is rebooting.
That image reminds me of the transhumanist YouTube series H+. In one of the first episodes one of the characters keeps trying to “reboot” after his implant succumbs to a computer virus capable of killing people.
Having the logic to interpret and respond to input on the device reduces the latency between interaction and effect. Also having at least some power on the device means it's useful by itself. It also reduced batter drain on both devices to only send small BT packages instead of essentially streaming video constantly during use.
I stopped reading at "paints an image directly onto your retina". This device is basically a miniature DLP laser projector that projects light onto a fancy light gradient stuck to the glass. You are looking at a reflection, nothing is painting your eyeball.
But then he explains that the projected image is always in focus, never blurry no matter where his eyes are focusing. I know next to nothing about the optics so could be wrong though
If the article is correct it is an important difference because the light is directly projected such that it's always in focus and not affected by the cornea so it's just always there and you don't have to change your focus to the read it.
"You are looking at a reflection, nothing is painting your eyeball."
Each photon is reflected to a specific, targeted location on the retina. This is in contrast to normal vision where photons are reflected from and to multiple angles.
Which is why this is always perfectly in focus -- the normal path of light means that light is captured across the surface of our eye and needs to be focused to converge on a point (within the limits of the eye's ability to do so, and with the reality that it only has one focus distance at a time). This system, in contrast, is "painting" the retina so that it is addressing specific target pixels, so to speak, regardless of the focus of the eye.
Nice explanation, thanks. Kind of like a very short throw laser projector where everything (the wall) is in focus, regardless of the distance or angle from the "fancy lens". I was just triggered by their use of "paint" when the process is passive.
Hrmmmm would have been good to know about the cost covering bit in the beginning of the article - but I digress.
I am extremely excited by the prospect of these or any glasses like system that can work well in a package that doesn't look like a bolted a computer to my head.
That laser warning sticker feels weird seeing as how that is literally the whole point of the glasses, so I'll probably wait for a 2nd iteration just to be sure. But for me, these would win over a decent watch any day.
IIRC the laser warning sticker is just required by law for any laser device of any appreciable power so there's no "well it's the whole point of the product" exemption to having the warning.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadHere's someone doing a (somewhat terrifying) DIY version: https://eclecti.cc/hardware/blinded-by-the-light-diy-retinal...
Virtual Retinal Displays are a pretty old idea, first being demonstrated in 1991. They've been stuck in development for years, so it's good to see them getting some more attention.
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/research/vrd/
We've been talking about these in Sci-Fi for years.
Surely the Jet Pack can't be far off now ...
Though the issue in the episode was the addictiveness of the game (which is already an issue) rather than the fact it painted directly on your eye.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Light
The glasses in Virtual Light "got these little EMP drivers around the lenses, work your optic nerves direct".
EDIT: Actually he wears goggles that the laser shines onto, so a little different
[1] https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/optical-microsystem...
Edit: Nope, the vertical resolution is really 150 line pairs.
[0] https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/optical-microsystem...
It's a lot less confusing if you read the article lol.
Regarding "shooting lasers at your eyeball, which sounds unhealthy", this technology has existed since at least the early '00s. Microvision was showing off their Nomad laser HMD (https://www.google.com/search?q=microvision+nomad) around 2002 IIRC. It's reasonably well established as safe.
https://www.bynorth.com/
Turns out the article mentions them.
Apple has been rumored to have such a product in the works. If theirs were this cool, I could see them really taking off.
Anecdotally, the only context I would want information beamed right into my line of sight is in work scenarios. All other scenarios I want technology to be in the background as much as possible.
Possibly even "real-world closed captions".
A tap for clock/calendar function would be handy.
Morse code (or other silent, maybe subvocal?) "telepathy" would be interesting as well.
I don't know how convenient or awful these would be in reality, but if the cost were not exorbitant and you weren't locked into a proprietary app ecosphere then it definitely seems like it would be worth a shot.
Everyone wants to sell me something at a huge discount because they know that the enhancements to their own database will pay for the difference. I just want the basic version of this for my own personal use, preferably with no online use at all short of maybe encrypted backups (maybe).
Please. I'll take 3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmet-mounted_display
(I'm kind of curious as to why the lasers can't directly hit the retina from the mirror array)
IEEE's coverage way back in 2003 and even by then a prototype existed as far back as 91.
I've been waiting for people to circle back around to this type of display for about a 2 decades now. I suspect the biggest barrier/reason is aversion to liability and safety of beaming lasers directly into customer eyes.
Yes, what could possibly go wrong while beaming a laser directly onto the retina?
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/wlva/
The consequence of being a point light source is that lenses can refocus the beam, parallel or not, back into a point. Doing so concentrates a lot of energy on a tiny surface. And if that surface is your retina, then that when it becomes dangerous, literally burning a tiny hole into it.
It can never happen with, say, a regular light bulb, or even the sun. It the light source is spread out, the image on your retina, or anywhere else, will be spread out, limiting the energy density. This is an indirect consequence of the second law of thermodynamics called the conservation of etendue.
(However... since I often see this sorta misinterpreted in the wild on the internet, note that is an if-then statement. If the antecedent is false, I make no claim.)
The primary safety concern I have would be met by designing the lasers such that if they are overdriven for any reason, they will physically burn out before outputting enough light to be dangerous. Per the classic Therac-25 [1] case study though, that is one safety feature I absolutely want in hardware. There is no amount of software I would accept to implement that.
I would also additionally stick some fuses into the system, tuned below the threshold where the power will burn out the laser, along with of course building the whole battery system to not be able to deliver enough power to power the lasers to a dangerous level. However, I really want excess power to physically burn out the lasers. (I wouldn't want to find out the hard way that an EMP of some sort can overdrive the lasers.)
For all that I'm laying out safety systems here, I am quite confident that it could be done safely. We trust our lives to much more dangerous systems all the time. I will say that I can't explain to you how you'd audit that safety, though.
[1]: https://www.bowdoin.edu/~allen/courses/cs260/readings/therac...
That part is not likely. If you concentrate the light over just a few retina cells, dangerous levels are very low.
True, but we usually get a pretty wide spread of light energies. These are likely going to be very specific frequencies, hitting similar areas over and over. I wonder if the retina can get fatigued of specific frequencies.
You can use the effect to generate colors that are actually impossible in the real world (and are only perceived):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color
Since we only see in three color dimensions, it's hard for us to notice day-to-day, but for instance, some fluorescent bulbs are just 5 spikes in particular frequencies. It looks fairly "white" to us, but it's far from normal light.
(I am interpreting your comment as being fatigued of/damaged by very specific frequencies in a way that it would not be fatigued/damaged for the same amount of energy spread out over a wider range still within the given cone's sensitivity range.)
Yep, that's my concern. I don't know if anyone's done long-term studies about low-level light of identical wavelength.
I mean, on the one hand, people used to be afraid of fast-moving vehicles, convinced that it was impossible for a human body to survive going faster than 40 miles per hour.
But on the other hand, people used to strap radium to their faces because they thought it was a cure-all, too.
I thought they kinda did. By being very similar wavelength and power, compared to normal light which has all sorts of wave lengths and power. This difference can mean certain rods/cones being stressed more than average and not triggering the sort of fatigue that normal light would cause.
Perhaps the best example of a similar concept, though not with lasers, is looking at a total solar eclipse right before or after the sun is fully eclipsed. There is a small period of time where extremely bright light makes it into our eyes, but not he frequencies that cause pain normally associated with looking at the sun. This means that our default defenses against looking at the sun don't kick in and doing permanent eye damage is extremely easy without feeling any pain as the damage is done.
End of the article: "Bosch covered our costs for attending CES 2020."
I mean it's possible they paid for him (and others) and still didn't allow him to get a demo... but it's unlikely. Also, I feel like IEEE can afford to pay the attendance costs for a reporter.
So, this is really just promoted content/an ad. Which is fine and it's even fine to wait until the end to tell us I think but not if the article body tries to paint a different, organic picture. This wasn't at all necessary for the content but simply there to detract from the paid promo nature of the piece.
> Robert Bosch LLC provided travel support for us to attend CES 2020. Bosch Sensortec, responsible for the Smartglasses Light Drive, was not aware of nor involved with the travel support.
So it seems like you are correct. The article could have been much more clear about this though.
It has been edited at some point within the last ~2 hours.
I don't think the new text changes anything, though. a) If that new text tries to paint the picture that this isn't sponsored content or might have bias, then why did they even mention that disclaimer? b) Which exact legal entity or subsidiary was "officially" sponsoring the trip isn't really that relevant when they are so tightly connected in brand and organizationally.
They could have simply started the article with: "This year Bosch invited us to CES fully covering our attendance cost."
or alternatively later on "while Bosch sponsored our trip we still had a really hard time getting a demo for ... because of ..." (e.g. too many people)
"We don't want this getting out just yet, but... oh okay, you can come behind the curtain just this once."
<end of private demo>
"So, what'dya think? By the way, here's a fresh marketing video we happen to have lying around. Tell everyone. No no, actually, let us pay you to tell everyone. We insist."
Sneaky disclosures kill any interest I have in a product/company.
Case in point, I'm not even going to read this article after reading this comment.
>Robert Bosch LLC provided travel support for us to attend CES 2020. Bosch Sensortec, responsible for the Smartglasses Light Drive, was not aware of nor involved with the travel support.
This IMHO makes it even worse. The article should clarify that they updated this description.
EDIT: where "visibility" also includes haptic feedback and all of that other good stuff. See http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
The good news is that AR can add visibility to hidden interfaces too. The bad news is that nobody will bother.
(somethingsomethingdesignedforcalifornia)
That's bad interface design IMO. I guess the headphones look "cleaner" but it's really annoying in practice and not worth it.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/VpG8uGSzWzCskN2m7
Can you write C? Do with it what you like. I'll make a javascript framework that runs on a smartphone too. (Nordic Bluetooth LE chip, microphone, speaker, 12 RGB LEDs, gyro/accelerometer, battery that should last weeks). Internet connected walkie-talkie, translator, study languages (like this: https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?t=8699).
I'll make more devices soon, and will sell them for $25. Send me an email, and I'll message when they are ready (mail in profile).
I flush repeatedly, turn on the water, and take out my phone and have very loud imaginary phone calls, or just cycle through the available ringtones at high volume.
Some people are still so low class that it doesn't even phase them.
I think a lot of people don't realize that a lot of people consider it a luxury to be out of contact for periods of time.
[0]: https://www.bynorth.com/
To that end, my experience of using transparency mode on AirPod Pro earbuds is that they very much do “become invisible” while allowing me to overlay (auditory) information on the world around me. If they were built to be as inconspicuous as my father’s hearing aids, nobody would know the difference and no overt social stigma would persist. The AR future of today is auditory.
When Bluetooth headsets became small enough to be inconspicuous I lived in a marginal neighborhood. When my wife and I would go out, we'd play a guessing game called "Bluetooth or mental illness."
That image reminds me of the transhumanist YouTube series H+. In one of the first episodes one of the characters keeps trying to “reboot” after his implant succumbs to a computer virus capable of killing people.
Who thought it was a good idea to put a whole computer in glasses or smartwatches?
Each photon is reflected to a specific, targeted location on the retina. This is in contrast to normal vision where photons are reflected from and to multiple angles.
Which is why this is always perfectly in focus -- the normal path of light means that light is captured across the surface of our eye and needs to be focused to converge on a point (within the limits of the eye's ability to do so, and with the reality that it only has one focus distance at a time). This system, in contrast, is "painting" the retina so that it is addressing specific target pixels, so to speak, regardless of the focus of the eye.
Their terminology seems okay.
I am extremely excited by the prospect of these or any glasses like system that can work well in a package that doesn't look like a bolted a computer to my head.
That laser warning sticker feels weird seeing as how that is literally the whole point of the glasses, so I'll probably wait for a 2nd iteration just to be sure. But for me, these would win over a decent watch any day.