SOLDIER looks up from his foxhole, scans the terrain with his naked eye and immediately sees hidden land mines, artillery and even troops behind walls.
A doctor looks down at her patient and sees not only the body but a detailed outline of the organs and vessels beneath the skin and knows exactly where to begin the procedure.
This Superman like vision, which does away with video monitors by beaming information directly from a transmitting device on to the eye, could soon become a reality with work funded by US company Microvision.
Microvision is developing "virtual retinal display", which creates a virtual video screen for viewers by rapidly scanning an image directly on to the retina with a pinpoint beam of light. Developed by the University of Washington's Human interface Technology Laboratory, the laser beam paints rows of pixels on to the eye. The viewer sees the picture as if a full colour screen were hanging in the air just in front of them.
"That's the utter simplicity of it and that is the beauty of it," said Richard Rutkowski, president of Microvision, which demonstrated the technology with a prototype at a recent conference in Lake Buena Vista, sponsored by the Gartner group.
Originally backed by a number of rich individuals in the Seattle area where it is based, Microvision went public on August 27th and raised a further $16 million.
Although commercial products are not expected until the third quarter of 1998, the company believes it is well capitalised. Rutkowski said "augmented vision" could prove popular in the military, medical and industrial fields where information - diagrams of various sorts could be superimposed over normal sight to provide intricate details.
The US Army has been keen to find ways to deliver the huge amounts of information gathered from satellites and other sensing systems to soldiers in the field. Conventional devices such as laptop computers have not proved practical, but the idea of using virtual retinal display has been gaining interest among the military, company officials say.
In the consumer field, one application would be to use the technology in conjunction with the cellular phone, instead of just talking and listening to voicemail messages, the phone could lie equipped with a small opening to beam up information to allow an image of electronic mail or even access to the Internet.
"It's obviously a stunning development in display technology, something that seems like science fiction but is actually here today," said Gartner analyst Jackie Fenn in a panel discussion with Microvision. Fenn, however, wondered whether people would fear damaging their eyesight with such revolutionary technology.
Rutkowski said the scientific answer was that the amount of photon energy coming out of the system, depending on the application, was anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 times less light than that considered safe by the American National Standards institute.
"It's a challenge as you educate your prospective customer base to assure people that this is in fact an entirely safe technology to use," Rutkowski said.