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Comment by saalweachter

6 years ago

I know that "light going into your eyeball" is how your eyes work, and that conventional monitors are not suspected to be great for your eyes, but "shoot light directly at your retinas" always makes me nervous.

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saalweachter

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XorNot  6 years ago

Monitors are bad for your eyes because of the strain of long term focusing at a plane a short distance away - not because of the light hitting your retinas.

Lasers are dangerous to the eye because there's no real ramp up for the beam - you can produce an almost arbitrarily powerful pin-prick of light which gives you no warning before it's all hitting the same spot on your retina and destroying it. The beam doesn't diffract of diffuse because it's all one wavelength and colliminated so it puts all that energy suddenly on one part of the eye.

But that property is also what makes the idea of using them for VR/AR amazing: because you could more or less directly target individual parts of the retina with no diffraction, then there's no eyestrain - everything can be made always in focus because the nature of the beam means it essentially bypasses your eye's lens. Your eyes relax because you think everything's in focus already.

rl3  6 years ago

I suspect in about 20-30 years that method will be considered antiquated, and brain implants with direct access to the user's visual cortex will be far more sensible for that kind of thing.

  • 6gvONxR4sf7o  6 years ago

    AR brain implants in 20-30 years? We can't even cure hemorrhoids. No way that timeline is accurate.

    • rl3  6 years ago

      Not saying it'll be commonplace by then, just that the technology will probably exist.

      As I understand it today, Neuralink already has a surgical robot that can thread electrodes in between individual neurons with minimal damage.

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