Reflection Technology
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| Reflection Technology | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| Industry | Display technology |
| Founded | 1986 |
| Founder | Allen Becker |
| Headquarters | Waltham, Massachusetts, United States |
| Notable Personnel | Allen Becker (president and CEO), Benjamin Wells (chief scientist), Nate Goldshlag (director of electronics), Steve Lipsey (vice president of sales and marketing) |
| Products | Private Eye, FaxView, Scanned Linear Array displays for the Virtual Boy |
Reflection Technology (Reflection Technology, Inc.) was a privately held American display company based in Waltham, Massachusetts. It developed the Private Eye, a small monocular head-mounted display that built a full image from a single column of red LEDs and a vibrating mirror, and it licensed that display technology to Nintendo for the Virtual Boy.[1][2] The company called its patented display method the Scanned Linear Array (SLA).[1][3]
Allen Becker founded the company in 1986.[2][4] The Private Eye went on sale in 1989 and was used in several early wearable computers and augmented reality research systems.[5] The only consumer products to use its display were Nintendo's Virtual Boy, which combined two of the displays for stereoscopic 3D, and Reflection's own FaxView fax reader.[2][1] The Virtual Boy's commercial failure was financially devastating for the company, which ran out of money soon afterwards.[2][4]
History
Founding and the Private Eye
According to Fast Company, Becker had the idea in 1985. He had worked with Ray Kurzweil at Kurzweil Computer Products on a flatbed scanner that swept a single line of light-sensitive diodes across a page, and he applied the same principle in reverse: a single line of LEDs whose reflection is swept across the viewer's eye by a mirror oscillating 50 times a second, so that persistence of vision fills in a full image. Because he could not fabricate his own arrays, he used an existing red LED array made by AEG Telefunken for large-format printers, which is why the display could only show red on black.[2] Becker's patent for the "Miniature video display system" was filed on 27 July 1987 and granted on 19 June 1990 as US patent 4,934,773, assigned to Reflection Technology.[6]
Becker raised a first round of funding from contacts including Kurzweil and Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, and formed Reflection Technology in 1986 with salesman Neil Golden, Polaroid veteran Benjamin Wells (chief scientist) and former Kurzweil engineer Nate Goldshlag (director of electronics). The team started in the basement of a former bakery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[2][4] Nintendo's 1995 announcement gave a slightly different account, describing the company as "founded in 1987 by a team of scientists from MIT".[1]
The team shrank the prototype into the Private Eye, a display about 1 inch across that Fast Company described as simulating a 12-inch screen seen from 18 inches away.[2] Becker published a design case study of the device in the Society for Information Display's magazine Information Display in 1990.[7] The company marketed it for hands-busy work, such as surgeons checking vital signs or aircraft technicians reading manuals. Hughes Aircraft licensed it as a heads-up display, and several small PC makers announced portable computers using it, none of which reached the market.[2] After the Private Eye drew attention at the Fall 1988 COMDEX show, Reflection sold it in a development kit with a headband and computer interface board for 5,000 US dollars; Steve Lipsey, the company's vice president of sales and marketing, told Fast Company that it sold about 75 to 100 kits.[2] Kill Screen reported that dozens of companies bought development kits but very few products reached the market, and that office testers found the all-red text tiring to read for long periods.[4]
Games and the Nintendo deal
Around 1990 the company built a game demo from two Private Eye units mounted on a welder's mask and a primitive head tracker, running a first-person tank game on an IBM PC-compatible computer.[2] Kill Screen described one version as a football helmet fitted with two Private Eyes and a Polhemus magnetic tracker, and another as a visor built with Frog Design.[4] Lipsey pitched the technology to toy and game companies. Talks with Mattel and Hasbro went nowhere, and former Sega of America president Tom Kalinske told Fast Company that Sega passed because children got sick, threw up or fell over when using it, and because the display showed only one color.[2]
In 1991 Lipsey visited Nintendo in Kyoto through Jack Plimpton, the company's liaison in Japan. Gunpei Yokoi, head of Nintendo R&D1, took up the technology.[2] Fast Company reported that Nintendo bought a worldwide exclusive licence for video games that included 10 million US dollars in advance royalties, together with a minority stake in the company. Kill Screen gave the figures as 5 million US dollars for the exclusive rights plus 10 million US dollars in upfront royalties.[2][4] Inside Reflection the work was known as the "Dragon Project". Nintendo had Mitsumi build the console's display assemblies, and Wells and other Reflection staff spent most of their time working with Mitsumi's engineers.[2]
In a press release dated 6 January 1995, Nintendo said it had acquired a minority interest in Reflection Technology, its first such investment in a US-based company, and had received "exclusive worldwide licensing rights within the video game market" to the company's patented display technology.[1] RCR Wireless News reported in December 1994 that the financial terms were not disclosed, that licensing talks had begun more than two years earlier, and that Becker was the company's president and chief executive. It also named Negroponte as an investor.[3] Kill Screen reported that Negroponte sat on the company's board.[4]
At Reflection's suggestion, Nintendo hired Eli Peli of the Schepens Eye Research Institute to study whether the display could harm eyesight. According to Wells, the study found one risk: young children could develop lazy eye if the two displays were vertically misaligned. Reflection therefore mounted the displays in a rigid plastic case and a precision steel frame.[2] The Virtual Boy was released in Japan on 21 July 1995 and in North America on 21 August 1995 at 179.95 US dollars.[2]
FaxView and closure
Reflection also pursued telecommunications. In December 1994 RCR Wireless News described its FaxView Personal Fax Reader, an accessory that plugged into a cellular phone and showed an 8.5 by 11 inch fax as a single image. It was then in market trials with GTE and Southern New England Telecommunications, and the company was planning fax and e-mail pagers and handheld telephones with full-screen displays.[3] A 1988 patent application by Wells and Becker, granted in 1991, covers a telephone handset with a full-page visual display.[8] Nintendo shared its Winter CES booth with Reflection in January 1995, where Reflection showed FaxView.[2]
The company had planned to go public after the 1995 holiday season. According to Kill Screen, Becker expected the Virtual Boy launch to raise the company's value, so it waited; board member Fred Bamber said that going public before the launch might have raised another 50 million US dollars. After the console's poor sales the company raised about 10 million US dollars through a private auction instead.[4] FaxView went into production in late 1995 but did not sell.[2] Wells built a full-color version of the display with red, green and blue LEDs and showed it to Nintendo, which declined it.[4] Becker and Maurice Karpman filed a patent for generating full-color images with two light sources in October 1995, and Wells, Bruce Johnson and Donald Dilworth filed one for a split-lens video display in March 1996, both assigned to Reflection Technology.[9][10]
Accounts of the end differ. Kill Screen reported that the company closed in September 1996.[4] Fast Company reported that around 1997 it announced a full-color Private Eye called the P7 but ran out of money before finishing it.[2] Becker later worked on water purification technology for developing countries. Fast Company reported that he died on 14 October 2001, aged 53; Kill Screen gave the year as 2002.[2][4] Patent assignment records list a security interest in the company's patents for Technologies for Information & Publishing, L.P. dated 31 January 1997, and an assignment of the patents from Reflection Technology to Microvision dated 28 January 2004.[6][9]
Products
| Product | Years | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Private Eye | Sold from 1989 | Monocular red LED display for computers, sold with a headband as a development kit[5][2] |
| Virtual Boy display units | 1995 | Two SLA display units per console; Nintendo held the exclusive video game licence and Mitsumi built the assemblies[1][2] |
| FaxView | Market trials 1994; production late 1995 | Handheld fax reader for cellular phones using a Private Eye display[3][2] |
Private Eye specifications
The figures below come from published descriptions of the display; the sources give slightly different package sizes and virtual image sizes.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Display | Red LEDs on a black background, one column lit at a time and scanned horizontally by an oscillating mirror[11] |
| Resolution | 720 (H) x 280 (V) pixels[11][5] |
| Field of view | About 21 x 14 degrees[11] |
| Virtual image | A 12 in monochrome monitor at about 2 feet (Peli); a 15 in display at 18 in (MIT timeline)[11][5] |
| Refresh | 50 frames/sec, non-interlaced[11] |
| Contrast and brightness | 30:1 nominal; 2 foot lamberts nominal[11] |
| Size and weight | 1.1 x 1.2 x 3.2 in, about 2 ounces (Peli); 3.5 x 1.5 x 1.25 in for the "P4" model (MIT timeline)[11][5] |
| Price | Engineering development kits at 550 US dollars in 1994, according to Peli[11] |
XR work
The Private Eye was used in several early wearable computing and augmented reality research systems. The MIT Media Lab's wearable computing timeline lists it as the display in Columbia University's Student Electronic Notebook (1990), Doug Platt's "Hip-PC" (1991), Carnegie Mellon's VuMan 1 for browsing blueprints (1991) and the system that Thad Starner began wearing daily in 1993, which later became MIT's "Tin Lizzy" design. The same timeline states that users of KARMA, the 1993 maintenance augmented reality system by Steven Feiner, Blair MacIntyre and Doree Seligmann at Columbia, wore a Private Eye over one eye so that its graphics overlaid the real world.[5]
The display also had medical uses. In a 1994 paper, Eli Peli described Optelec's Bright Eye, a portable electronic magnifier for people with low vision built on a modified Private Eye that could show live video from a camera instead of only still graphics. He noted that the headset could be configured for either eye and placed above, below or directly in front of the wearer's line of sight, and that a focusing knob corrected for spherical refractive error.[11]
Fast Company described the head-tracked tank demo as, in essence, a prototype of a very inexpensive virtual reality headset. Wells said that any perceptible delay between head movement and the image could cause motion sickness, and that the demo was "always on the 'too slow' side of the vomit point".[2] Nintendo's own plans for a head-worn console were dropped over weight and liability concerns, and the Virtual Boy shipped as a tabletop console on a stand.[2]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 "Nintendo announces investment in Reflection Technology Inc.". Planet Virtual Boy. Nintendo. 1995-01-06. https://www.virtual-boy.com/hardware/virtual-boy/articles/733028/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 2.20 2.21 2.22 2.23 2.24 Benj Edwards (2015-08-21). "Unraveling The Enigma Of Nintendo's Virtual Boy, 20 Years Later". Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/3050016/unraveling-the-enigma-of-nintendos-virtual-boy-20-years-later. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "Reflection receives investment from Nintendo for game device". RCR Wireless News. 1994-12-05. https://rcrwireless.com/19941205/archived-articles/reflection-receives-investment-from-nintendo-for-game-device. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 Jon Irwin (2015-08-21). "Seeing red". Kill Screen. https://killscreen.com/seeing-red. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Bradley Rhodes. "A brief history of wearable computing". MIT Wearable Computing Project. MIT Media Lab. https://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/lizzy/timeline.html. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "US4934773A - Miniature video display system". Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US4934773A/en. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ Al Becker (1990-03). "Design case study: Private Eye". Information Display, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 8-11. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2637-496X.1990.tb05924.x. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ "US5048077A - Telephone handset with full-page visual display". Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5048077A/en. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 "US5657165A - Apparatus and method for generating full-color images using two light sources". Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5657165A/en. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ "US5742421A - Split lens video display system". Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5742421A/en. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 Eli Peli (1994). "Head-Mounted Display as a Low Vision Aid". 1994 VR Conference Proceedings. https://pelilab.partners.org/papers/VR1994_headmount.html. Retrieved 2026-10-13.