Thank you for visiting "The Navigator – Live." Today's chat ended at 3 p.m. EST.

Today my guest was an old friend, Todd McIntyre, of Microvision. Todd's company, founded in 1993, is on the sharpest edge of the digital future. According to its company profile, Microvision "takes advantage of the human visual system to project electronic information on the eye without the use of a screen of any kind." They call it a Virtual Retinal Display. Todd explained all that and other bleeding edge technologies.

"The Navigator – Live" appears each Thursday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern time. It's a live, moderated discussion offering washingtonpost.com users the chance to talk directly to intriguing and sometimes unusual guests who are shaping the digital world. "The Navigator" appears in The Washington Post print edition every Thursday. You can read past columns by following this link.

Linton Weeks: Hello to everybody and my old pal, Todd. Let's get right to the questions.

Todd McIntyre: Thanks, Linton. It's great to be here with you today.

Linton Weeks: Todd, one of the last times I saw you, you were blasting a manual Underwood typewriter with a shotgun near Little Rock in the mid 1980s. How did you get involved with Microvision Inc.?

Todd McIntyre: Actually, it was a high-caliber rifle, as I recall, but that's beside the point....the effect on the Underwood was roughly the same.

I moved to Seattle in the late '80s to continue my career in publishing. At that time, methods for the delivery of digital media were just being explored, and CD-ROMs were the rage. After helping to start up a couple of new publications in Seattle, I became very interested in "convergence technologies" because I began to see that content would eventually be delivered in new ways that didn't necessarily involve ink and paper. Ultimately, that interest led me to pursue a graduate education in Silicon Valley because I figured that I would be in the very heart of it all. I wasn't disappointed!

When I returned to Seattle, I learned of a new display technology that was being developed at the University of Washington and being funded by a new company, Microvision. Though the technology was very raw at the time, I could see enormous potential in the personal display marketplace and in photonic imaging more generally. I joined the company as one of its first employees, wearing a lot of different hats.

Linton Weeks: What exactly does you company do?

Todd McIntyre: Microvision is a developer and supplier of electro-optics technologies that enable the manufacture of high performance visual displays, imaging systems and related products. The Virtual Retinal Display(tm), or VRD(tm) is the key innovation that Microvision has targeted to compete in the personal display category.

The company is aggressively developing the technology and seeking to commercialize the VRD. So far, we've delivered several prototype systems, primarily to defense and aerospace customers. We're pushing hard to advance the technology toward broader markets, and we've had many exciting technical as well as business breakthroughs in the last 24 months. Many of these have been reported in our press releases available at http://www.mvis.com.

It's my opinion that we have one of the most talented groups of photonics technologists in the world assembled here in Seattle, and we're really excited about what we're doing.

Linton Weeks: What is your job at Microvision?

Todd McIntyre: I'm Vice President of Business Development. I'm involved in technology acquisition, including in-licensing, out-licensing and cross-licensing activities. I handle strategic partnering and alliance-building activities. I am also responsible for exploring and analyzing new business opportunities that are not necessarily directly related to the personal display business. That keeps me pretty busy.

Linton Weeks: Can you explain "virtual retinal display" in terms an English major can understand?

Todd McIntyre: Well, I was an English major, so take heart...it can be understood. Perhaps the easiest way to think of the VRD is that it's like a micro-projector that is capable of writing an image onto any given surface. In the case of a retinal display, this micro-projector is using the retina of the eye as that surface. If we used a reflective screen as the projection surface, you'd have a projection display.

From a systems point of view, the VRD is most similar to the cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor that most people who are reading this are looking at right now. As you may know, a CRT scans a beam of electrons onto a phosphor-coated surface on the front face of the tube. The transfer of energy causes the phosphors to glow, and we in turn view the light emitted from the tube. Just like a CRT scans an electron beam, the VRD scans a visible light beam by bouncing that beam off two rapidly oscillating mirrors to form a raster (two-dimensional) image. That image can be conveyed through optics to the eye or to any other surface to create a display.

Linton Weeks: Do you hide your little laser-beaming gizmo in a helmet or a pair of Oakleys?

Todd McIntyre: We have built VRDs into helmets and other head-wearable configurations. It can certainly be made very, very small, and we can see a clear path to lightweight head-wearable solutions, as well as displays that would fit inside of portable communications devices like cell phones and pagers.

Linton Weeks: I know you've sold some VRD technology to the Pentagon. How do they use it?

Todd McIntyre: Our military customers are very interested in display solutions for a wide variety of applications, ranging from simulator displays, to cockpit displays and wearable displays for dismounted troops. Basically their interest in developing display technology boils down to this: The ability to deliver information to a combatant in real-time provides an enormous advantage on the battlefield. There's a leveraging effect you get from the abilty to provide this information, so that you can be a lot more effective with fewer soldiers and other military assets.

The problem has been that these customers have very demanding performance requirements for displays -- you need to be able to use them in very bright light conditions, for example -- that have historically been difficult for other technologies to provide. The VRD has many performance attributes that are very attractive for these applications. The VRD's advantages will translate into commercial applications as well.

Linton Weeks: At first blush, the process sounds dangerous. Is it? What kind of testing have you all done?

Todd McIntyre: We don't see any problem with the display as designed and neither do the experts, and here's why. We understand the common perception of the danger of lasers to the eye, which is justified for many kinds of high-powered industrial and military lasers not used for displays. Instead, we employ low-power light sources (lasers and LEDs).

We've worked directly with the US and UK top authorities, such as Dr. David L. Sliney of the US Army, who is the principal author of the ANSI standard on the safe use of lasers (which are used in some, but not all, of our systems), and his mentor, Professor John Marshall, of the St. Thomas Hospital in London. These experts conducted their own analyses of our display about two years ago and found it completely safe; that is, less than 1/100th of the acceptable retinal exposure. They are examining and endorsing our current laser exposure analyses for even brighter display systems.

More simplistically, think of it this way: If a display seems to be too bright for comfortable viewing, the natural response is to look away. This is true for any kind of light, whether it comes from the sun, a halogen light bulb, a CRT, or a VRD.

Washington, DC: Todd: Who are Microvision's main competitors?

Todd McIntyre: Microvision competes with other microdisplay manufacturers that are developing systems based on liquid crystal display (LCD) technology, field-emission displays (FEDs), ferro-electric displays (FLCs), as well as small CRTs and other display technologies. Their names are too numerous to mention here. All of these technologies share a common trait -- they form an image using a planar matrix or screen. Our approach, on the other hand, uses a scanned beam and eliminates the need for a screen.

Atlanta, GA: Do you expect the first commercial display to be a full color model utilizing the MEMs scanner and the superbright LEDs? Do you have a general timeframe for it's release?

Linton Weeks: These are good questions, Todd, but could you explain some of these pesky acronyms?

Todd McIntyre: First, let's address the acronyms. "MEMS" stands for Microelectromechanical Systems. This a promising technology area that has already found commercial application in airbag triggers, as well as a wide variety of other sensors. It utilizes semiconductor processing techniques to produce mechanical devices out of silicon. We're using it to build high performance optical scanners for our systems. Silicon processing technology promises low-cost mass-production.

"LED" stands for light-emitting diode. Superbright LEDs are a brighter version of common LEDs. We have announced that we can use superbright LEDs to build our displays systems for certain commercial applications, particularly those requiring portability and battery operation.

We have several candidate designs for our first commercial product. We have not yet disclosed the specifications for this system. Some of these designs do incorporate superbright LEDs and/or MEMS.

Annandale, VA: Would please you outline the resolution capabilities of this technoloty in terms of DPI and image size.

Todd McIntyre: DPI (dots per inch) does not really apply to our display. We think more in terms of achievable resolution and field of view. We have disclosed that we've delivered SVGA resolution and that we're under a development contract that targets HDTV resolution. We can see no major obstacles to achieving resolution matched to the acuity of the eye with large fields of view.

Rockville Md: Will we be using virtual retina displays to watch TV in the future?

Todd McIntyre: We sure think so...at some point.

Linton Weeks: Well, we're about half-way through. I'm going to take a sip of cherry coke. Keep those questions coming for Todd.

Washington, DC: How is this technology related to advancements in artificial vision? Is VRD something that might give sight to those who are visually impaired? or is this completely unrelated?

Todd McIntyre: We have evidence that suggests the VRD can be used to aid certain types of vision impairments. We are actively exploring this application of the technology, but we haven't publicly disclosed any results, yet.

Linton Weeks: Take a gander into your crystal ball and tell us about the digital future--convergent technologies and the rest.

Todd McIntyre: We see several trends driving demand for better display technology. The broad deployment of high-speed wireless networks will enable the Web to become available to people on the go. This will be facillitated by ubiquitous, virtually invisible computing power, that will be pervasive. There's also a great proliferation of information happening thanks in no small part to the incredibly fast adoption of the Internet, and specifically the Web. This drives demand for better ways to display information, and we believe we have a great solution to that problem. Your visual sense is your highest bandwidth portal to the brain. Better displays will enable these other technologies to be fully leveraged in the future.

Shelter Island, NY: How important was it for MVIS that you became the "baseline" optical technology by which the Navy will judge all such technologies?

Todd McIntyre: This was a huge and very meaningful validation of the promise and value of our technology. One of the most sophisticated customers around, the Navy, has examined our technology and officially established the VRD as a baseline.

Linton Weeks: How do you use the Internet personally?

Todd McIntyre: I can't seem to get away from it! It has been an incredibly powerful tool for me in my professional life, and we're rapidly approaching a time when it will be indispensable in our home life as well. I was an early adopter and have never looked back. I order books, food, plane tickets, groceries and lots of other stuff over the net, avoiding "real" stores whenever possible.

washington dc: Does your company make anything else besides the virtual retina displays/

Todd McIntyre: We've previously announced that we've demonstrated a projection display based on our core technology. We are also exploring the use of our technology for capturing images. Though it may not seem obvious, it is possible to use our scanning technology to capture images much like a digital camera. This broadens the scope of our business opportunities dramatically over the long haul.

Atlanta, GA: Are the superbright LEDs bright enough for full daylight use or are lasers still required for this application

Todd McIntyre: The answer mostly depends on whether the user needs to see the image superimposed on the real world or not. For many applications, superbright LEDs will provide ample brightness...and light sources continue to improve at a rapid pace.

Linton Weeks: And now I'll ask you the Official Question of 1999: What are you doing personally to prepare for the Y2K problem?

Todd McIntyre: I've decided to stay home! Other than that, I have no specific plans, but I have begun thinking more seriously about creating a contingency plan.

Lockhart, Texas: What is the status of the Army ("Comanche"?) helmet? Has it been modified to incorporate the latest resonant "MEMS" scanner? When will it be delivered?

Todd McIntyre: Unfortunately, I'm not at liberty to discuss the specifics of this development effort. The company will make an announcement when our customer allows us to comment on this program.

Linton Weeks: And there you have it. Everything you want to know about virtual retina displays and the world beyond. Thanks to Todd, the folks at Washingtonpost.com and all of you who sent in thorough and thoughtful questions. Until next time...

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