Holographic Sunglasses

My moleskine has been holding on to a rather provocative idea for quite some time. On 7th Aug. of 2006 I wrote about a television system with no moving parts. The idea is that you use an LED laser together with a couple of prisms made out of a material that changes refractive index based on an applied voltage. One prism does the horizontal scan, the other does the vertical scan. This may not work for room-sized projectors because the power output of an LED laser would be too small, but it would work well for near-field projectors; including glasses. The primary advantage of no moving parts isn’t that they can be manufactured cheaply, but that it can be made small enough to mount one on each lens of your glasses.

Though I’ve been sitting on this idea for quite some time, it was only last night that I asked myself an interesting question: What would you do with a different picture being fed to each eye? It then dawned on me: Holography, of course. Virtual objects could be painted into the real world!