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You may like to check out TekGear as a vendor of choice. They offer a number of attractive wearable displays for a bit less attractive prices.

Head mounted displays have *not* been fiction. Steve Mann has been building these things for decades. A number of commercial solutions, based on several generations of products exist. I count a total of 17 basic wearable display product lines at Tekgear, a distributor who focuses on wearable computing hardware. This sort of thing is so common that an Open Source toolkit has been developed to deal with the real problems with these displays -- not the graphics display, but the user input. The ArToolkit is an object-recognition system which allows easy, keyboard-less interaction with a computer mediated augmented reality display. It's rather far along.

Get above that and the cost rises in leaps and bounds

Some commercial displays

imagine the ultimate system: solid state flash SCSI drives, evaporative cooler, overclocked top of the line CPU. Overclocked system bus. the most fast ram that money can buy. Aluminium case. Top of the line graphics card. Hell, I'd ever throw in a tek-gear spectre headmounted display or a big super high res flat screen, a kick ass sound card and a 300 w five point speaker system to run the dvd drives off.

Now what do you do with this kind of power?

Actually not much specifically. I guess it's all about just having something with higher stats than everyone else.

Me too!! Although I was not impressed with the screen.

I'll wait for retinal projection.

As for input they have a arm mounted half-keyboard similar to this

or you can use a twiddler

When I grow up I want to be just like these folks (see bottom for pic)

TekGear - M1 Personal Viewer - TekGear

$500. That cheap enough for ya :-) Mono though, but not bad.

The M-1 a $500 320 x 240 gray scale display.

If you can't stretch to the M2 then the least obtrusive of any display is from MicroOptical Corp who make either tiny clip-on's which do QVGA (compress a 640x480 down to 320x240) and are VERY small, the other model is the integrated eyeglass - it looks just like prescription glasses. These are available now.

The inviso eShades that have had stories run on here are likely to hit market at around US$1000, the advertise in their press releases that it will be about 400-500, but after recent inquiries the price keeps rising, last I heard it was upto 800+. Don't hold your breath.

For displays NOW, unless you can build your own driver electronics - FPGA use is what people are looking at for n=building the driver logic from.

I'd go with an M1, fairly cheap (As far as HMD's go) and well tested and known amongst the borg community. They can be hacked to fir into sunglasses with a lil bit of effort. For colour, most people go the hacked glasstron route.

see wearables.los-gatos.net for a comprehensive listing of most things wearable.

for arm based architecture I'd imagine you'd checked out the LART pages, but there is also an ARM based effor at MIT, its called mithril I believe, and the PLEB effort in Australia.

Hope that helps

Solo-Trek Personal Aircraft
AND.. The M2 Personal Viewer
AND.. A flight in a KC-135 Reduced Gravity Aircraft
But thats ALL I want!

might want to check out the M1 or M2 at tekgear.

it was rated the best display of 1999 i think the url is here. I got mine for $250 as an "imperfect" model, but i don't see any problems with it.

Here I have a whole bunch of links to further information about wearable computers and "enhanced reality" for anyone interested:

• A Brief History Of Wearable Computing
• Affective Computing
• BBC News: Japan Eyes Wearable PC
• Charmed Technology
• CNET.com: 10 Technologies That Will Take Over - #8
• CNN: Excuse Me, Is That A Monitor On Your Head?
• CNN: MIT 'Cyborgs' Bridge Gap Between Man And Machine
• CNN: Turn On, Jack In, And Geek Out With Wearable PC
• CNN: Wearable Systems May Cut Labor, Save Time
• CNN: Xybernaut Now Has Linux For Wearable PCs
• CNN Poll: Do You Want A Wearable Computer?
• Computer For The 21st Century, The
• ComputerWorld: Wearable Computers - Digitally Attired
• Context-Aware Computing
• CTHEORY: Body Delirium
• DisplayWear Incorporated
• Extreme Computing
• Handykey, Inc. Wearable Computing Page
• Houston Chronicle: Future Phones Home, The
• ICBorg
• Intelligent Information Filters And Enhanced Reality, by Alexander Chislenko
• ISWC- International Symposium on Wearable Computers
• Marvin Elizondo's Wearable Computing Page
• MicroOptical
• MIT-IDEO Wearables Intro
• NetWork Fusion: Armani, Karan, Xybernaut? 02/01/999
• PBS: Scientific American Frontiers Transcripts - Inventing The Future (Aired Fall 1996)
• PC World News: Wearable PC To Debut At Comdex
• PopSci.com Headlines: CyberFashions
• Slashdot Articles: Wearable PCs Under Linux
• Smart Rooms
• TechWearable
• TekGear
• Wearable Computer
• Wearable Computing Intro Page
• Wearable Computing Portal
• Wearable Computing Resource Page
• WearableGear.com
• Wearables Central
• Wearables WebCrawler Search Engine
• Wearables Webring
• WearableTech Corp.
• Wired News: Annotated Reality
• Wired News: Intel Chips In On Future Devices
• Wired News: Waiting For Wearable Wearables
• Wraith Projects
• Xybernaut

Impossible means no one's done it yet.

On the other hand, there have been lots of nifty things going on in wearable-land lately, and it is indeed getting cheaper. You can put together a pentium-class truly wearable system these days for about the cost of a good desktop machine. Check out EMJ ( http://emjembedded.com) and for a truly wearable HMD, look at microooptical ( http://microopticalcorp.com), or at tekgear for the M1 ( http://tekgear.ca). The HMD's are both greyscale QVGA now, but the M2 is expected to be out in a year or so (?) and is projected to be 16M color 800x600, and MicroOptical is also working on a color high-res version of their display.

Make no mistake, wearable computing (IMHO) will be The Next Really Big Thing in computing, sort of akin to the PC in the late 70's-early 80's or the internet in this decade. This won't be for maybe another five years, but those of you who want to be in on the ground floor, start hacking now! :-)
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