If the lasers are low-powered enough it should be just the same as looking at a screen, shouldn't it? Either way the same amount of photons are hitting your retina, with a laser they are just aimed more carefully.
I'm mostly in agreement with you, but the part that gives me concern is precisely how precisely the lasers will be aimed at the retina. I doubt anyone ever really looks at a screen in the exact same place (even if you are staring at a specific character) due to eye jitter. After a year or twenty of use are we going to start having burn-in on our retina's similar to plasma screens used as kiosks?
With lasers, the photons are collimated, so they're all going almost exactly the same direction, instead of just being scattered like with normal light sources. Because of this, it doesn't take that much laser power in your eye for your lens to focus it down to a small patch on your retina and burn holes in it. So you'll need very low-powered lasers for this to be safe. But it certainly should be possible.
Lasers are effectively point light sources.
We usually think of them as perfectly collimated light, but that's just a special case, where the point is at infinity.
The consequence of being a point light source is that lenses can refocus the beam, parallel or not, back into a point. Doing so concentrates a lot of energy on a tiny surface. And if that surface is your retina, then that when it becomes dangerous, literally burning a tiny hole into it.
It can never happen with, say, a regular light bulb, or even the sun. It the light source is spread out, the image on your retina, or anywhere else, will be spread out, limiting the energy density. This is an indirect consequence of the second law of thermodynamics called the conservation of etendue.
You can go blind looking at the sun or any high powered light source for long enough. If the laser is at a low enough power, then this is no different than looking at any reflected light. The damage is due to the energy density so you just lower the energy.
