Microvision ShowWX+ pico projector. They’d been advertising their laser-based VR tech for almost a decade but still had zero products on the market, so when they advertised a portable, battery-powered 640x480 laser projector with adapters for cell phones (this was 2010 so fairly unusual) I ordered one. I hoped I’d get something fun for travel/work use, and maybe help kickstart Microvision finally selling what was supposed to be a revolutionary VR display. Supposedly it required no focusing and would produce a bright image from 1’ to 6’ wide.

It was $400, arrived months late, didn’t work out of the box, and even when I finally had everything updated, it was so dim you could only see it in a pitch-black room or when the projector was inches from a reflective surface. To top it all off, the “low power, highly efficient” laser module constantly overheated.

Just a complete disaster. I think in the following 16 years they’ve sold maybe a dozen monochrome HMDs to the Air Force… for analyzing skin cracks in grounded planes.