Touched with Light: Scanned beams display or capture information at video rates

April 6, 2006
John R. Lewis | Microvision

People like to look at images and interact with them. We will show how scanned beam technology can either display, or capture images, and that this makes it unique when compared to other display technologies such as LCD,PDP,OLED, or projection. Scanned beam is what is used in laser printers in one dimensional form. We have replaced the polygon by a MEMs device as small as a few millimeters in size that scans in two dimensions at video rates. This small size and simplicity enables a range of applications from personal head worn displays, image capture for and endoscope, or very light weight, power efficient direct view displays. Scanned beam is the most direct connection between images in memory, and the physical manifestation or source of that information.

Speaker Details

John R. Lewis received a B.S. degree in Physics with a Mathematics minor from M.I.T. in 1971. He was an early developer of scanned lasers in applications while at Polaroid from 1979 to 1996. Work there resulted in a laser printed media system for medical diagnostics. He joined Microvision in 1996 and built a research group there to develop scanned beam technology. He is the author or co-author of 22 Microvision patents and patent applications, and wrote a general description of this work in the May 2004 IEEE Spectrum magazine cover story entitled “In the Eye of the Beholder”. In 2003 he was appointed Microvision Fellow, and is currently seeking to enable the adoption of this technology into a wide range of applications.