News Microdisplay tracks your pupils to adjust brightness, avoid HUD fatigue

[Admin]

Kopin's NeuralDisplay Tech builds an eye-tracking camera into a microdisplay and uses it to dynamically adjust brightness and contrast.

Microdisplay tracks your pupils to adjust brightness, avoid HUD fatigue : Read more

 

[coolitic]

Seems like a grossly over-engineered solution, when otherwise the problem can be simply solved by adjusting the HUD brightness to match "ambient" light-levels.

 

[apiltch]

So it's not about the ambient light. It's about the users' physiological reaction. In other words, you are watching a movie and there's a jump scare in the movie; your retina dilates because of your reaction to that stimuli. That can't be predicted by ambient light and it's not the same for every user.

 

[edzieba]

While heads-up displays aren't very common for consumers — Apple's expensive Vision Pro aside

Vision Pro is also not a HUD, it's a Mediated Reality HMD.

When you stare at the microdisplays inside a typical headset

Very few modern headsets use microdisplays, due to the Etendue issue preventing useful FoVs from being achieved, and the limited brightness available - particularly for view-through HUDs.

For example, if you see something in a movie that makes you emotional and your pupils dilate, all of a sudden the headset will seem annoyingly bright and you might be tempted to flip it off of your head.

The real word is also of fixed brightness. Unless 'getting emotional' makes you want to claw your eyes out when walking around your everyday life, this purported effect is imaginary.


There are all sorts of reasons to have pupil-tracking and gaze-tracking (related, but very much not equivalent) in a HMD. Variable brightness based on pupil diameter is not one of them: the only time your pupil will not be directly adapting to the on-screen imagery exactly like it would to any other visual stimuli is when there is a second visual stimulus overwhelming the display - i.e. when using a view-though HUD with an environment of highly varying brightness. In that situation, it is not the display causing visual discomfort that is the problem, but the much brighter external environment washing out the display. That problem has a solution, and it's not a camera system to track pupil size: it's a photodiode facing outward to measure ambient light levels.
ps. existing non-head-mounted and head-mounted HUDs (e.g. the Joint Head Mounted Cuing System) already use adaptive brightness, without any eye-tracking. Ironically, Kopin's products would be worthless for the JHMCS and similar aircraft head-mounted HUDs (like the F-35 HMDS), and they do not use microdispalys. They use 'bird bath' optics with larger panels and delay optics to produce a curved focal surface across a FAR wider field of view than a microdispaly could hope to achieve - that etendue issue again.