Anonymous Said...

Here's a really great comment from my recent post about Color Eyewear that I'd like to do my best to answer...

As someone who's been on the edge on investing in MVIS for quite some time, I'm also interested to know just how good the core technology is, as in does it blow everything else out of the water? Living in Europe, I obviously haven't been able to see any prototypes for myself.

There must be a big difference between what Microvision and companies like eMagin are doing. They're basically just using tiny LCD screens, right? The question is, will Microvision's Color Eyewear provide a viewing experience comparable to or even transcending television? The resolution would have to be HD, not to forget great contrast and field of vision.

I'd just like to have some kind of an idea of where Color Eyewear in its present form stands, qualitatively, when compared to other ways of getting information into the human visual cortex. Also, what can we expect in the future, say the next five years?

Thanks for this question. There are some big differences between what Microvision is doing and what every other display company is doing. The most fundamental being that we are scanning beams of light temporally and spatially to create a virtual image. There is no screen with our technology, just beams of light that are moving at very fast speeds and appear to create a persistent image on your field of view.

At the heart of our technology across all of our product initiatives is the Integrated Photonics Module, which is a tiny projector engine that contains red, green and blue lasers, electronics, optics and a MEMS scanner in an ultra-thin package. The same IPM components and packaging (with some amount of reconfiguring) can be leveraged across the MicroHUD (automotive and aerospace head-up display), PicoP (embedded or accessory full-color ultra-miniature projector) and Color Eyewear (lightweight fashion eyewear with embedded display) product lines.

So, the IPM is key to our strategy and to our competitive advantage. Every other display technology has a physical, fixed-pixel substrate that is so big by so tall and takes up real estate in the real world. As the mobile phone has eclipsed and subsumed all other forms of consumer electronics, the need is becoming acute to deliver a big screen experience without compromising the small, thin, pocketable form-factors that really drive demand for new models of cell phones.

Now there are technologies that unfurl displays from inside a tube, and there are other things like this that we pay close attention to. But we feel that the ultra-miniature laser projector is the most elegant way to get big experiences into super-compact form-factors. And there is strong market pull for our solutions that tells us we're on the right track.

Another key to our competitive advantage is that we use spectrally pure lasers. Lasers can be bright enough for viewing in all ambient lighting conditions, unlike LCDs, and they enable us to display an extremely wide color gamut.

As I mentioned in my prior post, we intend to couple our IPM with a new optical design that will allow us to assemble lightweight, fashionable eyewear with an integrated, embedded display engine, in both see-through and immersive configurations.

We believe that technical and performance specs are extremely important to creating a valuable user experience -- and just as important are the ergonomic, fashion and usability concerns that have inhibited adoption of other forms of wearable displays. We'll meet these concerns head on by innovating and taking into account the real-world needs of customers, whether they be videogamers or cell phone users, or industrial workers. The focus will always be on usability and having a holistic view of the user experience of the entire product -- the union between the eyewear hardware and the content/application software infrastructure.

Over the coming weeks, we'll unveil our newest IPM design at CES in Las Vegas. At the same time, we're also working on a contract for the government that is bringing us closer to a see-through display solution with a form-factor of a pair of fashion eyewear.

Looking out over the next five years, we expect to have Color Eyewear successfully launched across a variety of segments, in a variety of configurations. We also expect the same IPM that powers Color Eyewear to power head-up displays in a variety of cars and for our PicoP personal projector to be designed into mobile phones by the leading handset OEMs.

Now, a lot of work has to be done to get us there, and there are no guarantees of success in any high-tech endeavour. But we feel a lot of confidence about the path we're on and about the value we can bring to anyone who needs a big display in a compact form-factor.