Head-mounted displays, more commonly known as data eyeglasses, have remained an exclusive class of gadgets until now, confined to being used by Hollywood secret agents, helicopter and jet fighter pilots, as well as by car designers. At this point, they work by supplying the wearer with additional information about their work environment, such as more information about a sketch or a model, but their functionality doesn't go very much beyond that. Now, German researchers at the Fraunhofer Institutes are planning to develop the technology into an interactive one.

“We want to make the eyeglasses bidirectional and interactive so that new areas of application can be opened up,” the business unit manager at the Dresden, Germany-based Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS, Dr. Michael Scholles, explains. A team of experts at the research organization are currently working on incorporating eye-tracking technology on future HMDs, so that users will be able to summon more information about a certain topic in their displays by simply moving their eyes there and looking at a section of text, for example.

The highlighted portion could be brought up or magnified, and more relevant data of it could be shown. This would open the way to true interactions between man and machine. Once the wearer would move their eyes to some other location, the text segment would revert to its initial size, and the sensors mounted inside the glasses would assess the next eye target. This innovation would allow engineers to look at intricate sketches, for example, without having to use their hands, or without speaking.

In their quest to create such a device, the German research team has developed a low-cost eye-tracking camera, and has opted to use a CMOS sensor as a display. This ensures that its final product is very light, small in size, and also inexpensive. The image in its prototypes is projected directly inside the retina, and not on the lenses. This allows the user to view it as if it were more than one meter away, and makes for comfortable reading, the experts say.