There's going to be a hard limit to the amount of power you can direct through this laser. The actual hardware is going to be responsible for safety in this dimension, not software.
Just look away. It's just a display device, so at most it's going to display confusing pictures.
It's not possible to "hack" more output power into lasers with software changes. Would that it was. You can change the duration of the beam, but you can't pulse the beam without a Q switch in a way that changes the instantaneous power.
In the normal operations, the laser will scan across the retina without long dwell times at a single spot. Software is likely able to cause the laser to track a single point on the retina (I expect that the device needs some sort of an eye tracker and thus a camera aimed at the eye). I don't know if that can produce a harmful power density.
Given that it doesn't harm the retina when scanning, I'd say "full white" is the best it could do, which could be surprising and a bit uncomfortable, but not actually damage the eye.
Picture your monitor going all white... bright for a sec, but that's about it.
Given that it's scanning the duty cycle as seen by any part of the eye is very small. If the perceived brightness was a function of power density averaged over time, then it would very obviously have to be able to be much brighter than "full white" to create the full white experience[^].
[^] in reality the perceived brightness is somewhat higher than the mean (i.e. a light source that's twice as bright with twice smaller duty cycle appears brighter). I'm not sure how large an effect that is, and whether it has anything to do with pupil size adjustment.
> Picture your monitor going all white... bright for a sec, but that's about it
I remember when a CRT monitor would mess up and stop scanning right the white point in the middle was much brighter than the normal brightness, I was always worried it would burn in and would shut off the monitor right away
Then you get some marketing logo etched into your retina :)
I'm wondering how is the laser scanned over the retina (probably some MEMS chip). What happens if the beam scanning is suddenly stopped in place, wouldn't you get the whole laser power concentrated in a small dot. And it happens so quickly that you won't have time to react.
There may also be some phantom image effects like we used to have on those old TV monitors. Or like we can have when fixating a picture.
What's probably more insidious would be projecting some very lightly superimposed structure. You probably can induce some unconscious cognitive load or nausea. By decreasing the discomfort for example when the user is looking at an ad, you will increase the effectiveness of the ad.
I guess maxing out its power would be comparable to looking at a full-white LCD screen. If the device has an ambient light sensor to adjust its brightness, then circumventing it and setting to full power could be comparable to switching on a bright light in previously completely dark room.
