After grabbing a couple of Microvision SHOWWX laser picoprojectors when they went up on Woot a few months back, I started looking for ways to use them. Microvision started out of a project at the University of Washington HITLab in 1994 to develop laser based virtual retinal displays. That is, a display that projects an image directly onto the user’s retina. This allows for a potentially very compact see through display that is only visible by the user. The system they developed reflected lasers off of a mechanical resonant scanner to deflect them vertically and horizontally, placing pixels at the right locations to form an image. The lasers were modulated to vary the brightness of the pixels. The SHOWWX is essentially this setup after 15 years of development to make it inexpensive and miniaturize it to pocket size. The rest of the retinal display system was a set of optics designed to reduce the scanned image down to a point at the user’s pupil. I thought I would try to shrink and cheapen that part of it as well.
