These are now (Jan 2002) moving from the labs into initial industrial applications and perhaps into consumer products. Vrds use low-power lasers to "paint" information directly on the retina, allowing a virtual overlay to give the appearance of a full-size monitor that could be used with tiny portable devices. With the move from research to early uses in medical and engineering applications, vrds could become an intimate and portable means of interacting with the informational world in the next decade.

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