We hope to hold more meetings at the University both to make it easier for our Seattle based friends to attend, and to widen the participation in the SIGGRAPH chapter. This meeting was filmed so once we figure out how to duplicate and distribute tapes other people will be able to share the experience. Please contact me if you are interested in borrowing a tape or helping manage the tape library!
That said we had a somewhat modest turnout of around 20 people. While this size group made the talk and hands on demonstrations very enjoyable for those who attended we will be working on getting the word out better next time.
Finaly before jumping into an overview of Tom's talk I want to take this opportunity to congratulate Steve Hollasch and his wife Lori on the birth of their first child!
Tom began with an anecdote describing how a Betty Edwards Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain art class made him believe in the latent abilities of humans. He began to see how traditional computer interfaces force humans to adapt to the computer, instead of the computer allowing more natural interaction using the inate abilities of humans.
This insight influenced his work while at Wright-Patterson . From designing the cockpit of the F-18, Tom moved on to researching a more efficient cockpit; the Virtual Cockpit.
Tom shared with us the challenges of creating such a 'meta-display'. Initialy they started with existing heads up display technology. Challenges included creating tiny 1200 line super hi-luminance CRT's to the areodynamics of helmet design even having some designed by the Folks at Lucas Arts who created the props for Star Wars. Tom provided many slides and even had example CRTs for us to examine.
With this introduction to the promise and challenges of this technology. Tom introduced us to the goals of the HIT Lab and the specifics of the Virtual Retinal Display. The VRD approach of writing the virtual image directly on the user's retina bypasses many of the limitations of conventional approaches: limited resolution, limited brightness/high power due to 'wasted' energy which never hits your eyes, fixed infinite focal distance among others. In theory the VRD is the ultimate display with the following characteristics: extremely high resolution, extremely wide dynamic range, very low power, small size/light weight, actual focal depth, extremely wide field of view, and very inexpensive to manufacture. In addition since the VRD bypasses the focusing optics of our eyes, in part due to the very small exit pupil of the image beam, the VRD image is perfectly clear for folk who need corrective glasses with or without their glasses on. This also applies to folk with non-retina based eyesight deficits (cataracts, fixed lens, etc.) they can remarkably see the VRD image clearly creating a market to help these folk! Another application is to crank up the power output of the laser and use the same unit as a video projector focused at any distance.
In practice Tom provided us with a demonstration of a monochromatic laser diode based prototype interfaced to a standard PC via a scan-converter providing the left to right then right to left pixel stream needed by the clever electro mechanical resonance based scanning optics. The laser and scanning head were in a small photographic-flash type housing. You could hear the unit buzz at the horizontal deflection rate. Tom also had examples of other commercial and prototype displkays for us to try.
After the formal talk ended most of us proceeded to the HIT Lab where we viewed full color vga resolution images on a full color VRD implemented on an optical table using gas lasers for the blue and green colors. There was divergence caused by the mirror deflectors running open-loop but the potential of this approach was very apparent to all who tried.
Many thanks to Dr Furness and folk from HITL who made this meeting possible!