Spectacular display

Surgeons could keep one eye on a patient’s vital signs and another on the
scalpel with a new computer display clipped onto a standard pair of glasses. The
ClipOn Eyeglass Display was developed by MicroOptical Corp of Westwood,
Massachusetts (www.microopticalcorp.com), and comprises a 640 × 480 pixel colour
LCD unit. This projects a computer image onto a tiny mirror stuck inside one of
the lenses. The image reflected back to the eye looks like a transparent
38-centimetre screen half a metre away. A prototype powered by a 100-milliwatt
belt-clip battery will be shown at the Society for Information Display meeting
in San Jose on 16 May.