Donnerstag, 1. Januar 2015

Virtual Retina Contact Lens Display

This blog is about propagating a new concept of a Virtual Retina Contact Lens Display that might evolve in the not too distant future.
It is a completely visionary concept without being already invented or engineered in any manner.
But it should be pointed out that all technological components of that imaginary design already exist in real reality though need yet to be heavily customized, configured and concerted in an overall engineered product.
Furthermore it has yet to be found out if it could work in that perfect way every VR/AR enthusiast would like to function it.
Namely projecting perfect holographic imagery onto the retina via collimated laser light with the widest field of view possible without the laser itself occluding any part of the perceived FOV the brain receives of the real world.
Therefore the laser that the VRD contact lens would incorporate would need to be very small, in the range of a few microns, much like the size of a single red blood cell (8µm). So would have to be a few micro mirrors that would scan the laser beam in a very fast mode over the entire retina.
But as 8µm+ is also the size of a very small dust particle and normal contact lens wearers have thousands imperceptibles of them nevertheless on the surface of the lens it is to estimate that a device component of a VRCLD that would sit somewhere in the center of the pupil wouldn't be noticeable at all for the brain.
Whereas already proposed concepts of contact lens displays in the past that would make use of tiny LEDs invisibility would be highly questionable once those would contain several million LEDs. It wouldn't serve the user as an AR display in any useful manner because the whole real world FOV would then get occluded.
For VR it could certainly be useful though it would nevertheless not be easy to focus millions of incoherent light sources onto the retina properly.
A contact lens inhabiting one or a few very small sized lasers and micro mirrors instead therefore would be the better solution, also because one wouldn't need to take off the lens once the user decides to leave VR.
Regarding the device in detail, the structure of the VRCLD itself would be fairly simple.
A laser diode with dimensions of 10x10 microns sits somewhre in the center of the lens pointing perpendiculary to the vision axis into the curved plane of the lens.
An optical waveguide leads the light to a micro mirror sitting a few hundred microns next to the diode. The mirror then projects the beam perpendiculary onto the retina in scanning mode.
For power a circle antenna sitting on the outer edge of the contact lens collects
a few hundred microWatts via electromagnetic radiation in the low Ghz band while a nanowire leading from the antenna to the laser transmits them. Also, the nanowire will because of its size be impercepeptible to the brain. Maybe it would need an opac coating as metal tends to be very visible
once it reflects light in the right angle and also because the wire for it length represents yet a very long object.
Besides that there has to be an electro optic modulator between light source and mirror 
that would modulate the desired holographic light fields that get projected onto the photoreceptors of the retina as well as a high bandwidth wireless connection for receiving the image itself from another computational device.


To be continued.....




60 GHz wireless chip from Georgia Institute of Technology



some useful background knowledge to understand how this could work in detail:

How our Retina works






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