Written on April 14, 2008 – 8:46 am | by Bogdan Alex |
You all know about the Terminator, no doubt about that. You might also remember the cool retinal HUD that we got to see in T2: Judgment Day. That type of display is no longer a cool sci-fi gimmick. Yes, the Japanese pulled it through once again.

Japan-based Brother Industries is responsible for the development of a wearable, portable version of its retinal imaging display (RID) technology, which gives people the chance to see things Terminator-style. The RID display was first included in a special pair of glasses, so that wasn’t quite at the retinal level. The new RID prototype attaches to a basic set of spectacles and works by focusing light onto the retina, moving it at high speeds to generate images that look like they exist right in front of your eyes. Although the glasses have become a tad lighter, the source box that feeds the actual image data to the glasses got bigger and can’t really be called portable, unless you carry it in a car or something.

Here’s how the RID system works. It is composed of three parts: the light source, the light scanner and the eyepiece module. The new prototype of the light scanner is about the size of a bulky Buetooth headset. That would be 1000 times smaller than the version Brother showed at EXPO 2005 in Aichi, Japan. As I’ve previously noted, the only thing that would pose big problems as far as portability goes at least, remains the light box.

Brother said that the huge light box could get as small as a portable drive by 2010, when it also plans to commercialize the system.