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Head Mounted Displays Get Cheaper
Jason Swank writes "It looks like previous model of Sony's Glasstron was mentioned back in July, but it seems like they are now better and MUCH cheaper: 52" Virtual Viewing, 3.5 ounces, and only $499.
" The one we reported on last july costed 5 times as much, but
the cheaper model is 800x255, the $2600 version is 800x640. Still it
looks pretty sweet. I wonder if I could use these without my contacts. That would make things a lot easier.
The eyes of children under 15 are still growing. Excessive near work may cause the eyes to grow into an elongated shape (I'm not sure if there are any formal studies showing this, but it would explain why nearsightedness progresses so rapidly in children that wear glasses). Once the eyes have finished growing, they are much less prone to change shape. Personally, I would be wary of staring into a screen just inches from my eyes for an extended period of time, even though I am in the recommended age range.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
WHERE? Where can I get such a great deal? How many points do they give?
--
More seriously - just wait about 18*2+n (n is how badly you want the device) months and it'll be reasonably priced and have a much nicer resolution.
anyone had the opportunity to see the xerox electronic paper scene up close? what up? will this be a viable, portable, low cost solution? when? alphie?
Anyway, I need glasses (short-sighted) - I'm much more interested in the little things etched onto a pair of "normal" glasses...
A Glasstron LDI-D100B (800x600) has different images for each eye, but it will set you back $4475 US. It uses a field sequential stereo rather than two video inputs. I'm not a fan of that, but then it's one of the cheeper units on the market. www.cgsd.com sells it as well as other Glasstron units.
Hey, just give me a 10" color TV and an RF modulator ..... :) 20 and 40 column text! yippie!
My journal has hot
Yes, it only has analog video input so you'd get only 300-400 pixels horizontally if you're lucky. At least they give the resolution. The VROS-1 page doesn't mention resolution, although $599.95 is mentioned.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball...
What it is referring to is ear-piece headphones, like the old gameboy ones.
This from the same company that said
"Do not attach dual shock to any part of your body" or the like...
British measurements come in troy and avoirdupois flavors. Yes, it's not complicated *enough*.
Troy ounces are 12-to-the-pound, and avoirdupois are 16-to-the-pound. Or possibly the other way around; I can't be arsed to look this junk up.
So 3.5 ounces are a shade under 1/3 pound if they're the 12-to-the-pound kind of ounces.
gomi
As I read it this sends a single display image to both eyes. So if only one eye is working you're not missing anything.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... in the Sony store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago just two weeks ago. Very impressive.
That said, this is very much a first generation, low resolution device. It only accepts NTSC video - no S-Video or computer output. A 52" display may be the calculated virtual size, but don't kid yourself. It looks like you are watching a movie through binoculars.
That said, when the second or third generation comes around and they get this right, this will be THE WAY to watch porno flicks and play video games.
I like my 12" CGA monitor just fine thank you.
Apathy -- The state of numbness of the mind. When you are apathic, you can think.
I would actually buy one of these if:
1. It supported SVGA
2. It had an optional head tracking device
3. It covered a wider field of vision
This would probably cover about 30 degrees of the field of vision, but all VR studies show you have to cover about 70 degrees to get the "I'm there" feeling.
Dammit, I've been waiting for this kind of thing for over ten years and they still haven't come close, although all the technology is there...
Oh well.
Weighs 3.5 ounces...just under 1/3 of a pound! I don't know about all of you, but where I live a pound is 16 oz. That makes 3.5 oz just under 1/4 pound, not 1/3 of a pound.
Your village called: Their idiot is missing.
Well, the glasses can only be used for television, and not for your computer--unless you use a tv-out card, but then the resolution would be very low, and text would probably be unreadable.
I have also something similar, but they could be used with your computer too. You can find more information at TigerDirect's Homepage.
Also, does anyone know if these glasses are also available for PAL? The page says that it can be connected to any NTSC source but it does not mention anything about PAL.
Did anyone else notice the warning? "This product is not intended to be used by children age 15 or younger." Does anyone have information on this? Maybe it does more damage to the eye than a normal TV screen?
The VR folk have a term for the generation of nausia when the visual image and the inner-ear sensations don't match.
It's "Barfogenisis"
(Example: The Star Trek ride at Disneyland has just enough mismatch that, at least for me, there was slight nausea which hit as I was leaving the ride.)
Apparently this is a survival mechanism: Under prehistoric, evolutionarily-significant conditions, the main thing that would cause significant mismatch between the motion perceived by the eyes and the inner ears was ingestion of a neurotoxin - typically from a poisonous mushroom or spoiled food. In such a situation, immediately emptying the stomach had a significant chance of allowing the victim to survive to reproduce when he would otherwise have died.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Darn right.
They are making the same mistake as Casio did when they came out with their color projection TV based on a slide projector light source and lens, dichroic mirrors, and three monocrhome LCDs. It was tiny. It COULD have been high quality and inexpensive.
Instead they used crummy low-res LCDs apparently left over from their midget black-and-white Radio Shack grade pocket TV sets. Half of TV resolution in each dimension, for an overall pixel count of 1/4 that of a normal TV set. (Then the projection lens blew it up to wall-covering size.) Rectangular (not square) pixels - so computer graphcis is a pain. To make it even harder: pixels arranged in a brick pattern (each row offset 1/2 pixel from its neighbors). And with a black border (i.e. "the mortar") around the pixels. (Blown up to wall size it really showed.)
And to top it off they wanted several thousand dollars a unit. B-b
This thing needs square pixels, 640x480 at dead minimum. And it should have a separate screen and interface for each eye - at least as an option.
I recognize those earphones - I used to use the earphone-only equivalent all the time. Good audio. But they're fragile. They (actually their cabling) need to be plug replacable, or the headset will fail in about 3 months of use.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Your parents always told you sitting too close to the TV would hurt your vision (though not go blind, that's reserved for other activities). People may now complain that they are having vision problems on account of being so close to the screens, or headaches and dizziness (common problems with headset-type monitors), and there'll probably be hundreds of lawsuits from people saying they have neck problems from supporting the monitors. Yes, 3.5 ounces is light, but that doesn't mean a lot of people won't try to capitalize on this.
-"Everyone who counts loves Ned Flanders"
Sorry, the right link is here.
Looks pretty deadly to me...
Hm, from the page:
Caution:
Do not use while subject to external motion
Well, this seems a bit unfair. This means that, say, a female could wear them during sex (internal motion) while a male could not (external motion). I say that we all go sue sony for sexual discrimination.
I too was in awe of the low price on the glasstron glasses. So much so that I ran to my local sony store to buy them. Before forking over my hard earned cash, I decided to test them out. Here are Dr. Gerbik's findings on the matter:
:)
Sony boasts that the glasses present you with a 52" screen that is about 6 feet in front of you. Here is what I saw. A 5 inch lcd screen 4 inches in front of me. I was impressed however with how the two lcd screens blended together as one. I was expecting to see some sort of line down the middle, or some overlapping.. nothing, it looked like one single screen.
As for resolution, I thought it lacked. I demoed the glasses with a DVD copy of "A bugs life" The best way to put it would be to imagine watching the movie in a 240x160 window on your desktop. The LCD just couldn't push the kind of resolution needed to make the movie look good.
In the end, they were neat. $500 neat? I decided not. I went home with some blank minidiscs in my shopping bag.. but no glasses. I would love to try the high resolution pair, but I'll definately be waiting on the price to drop... a lot.
There is another version which can be used on your computer, creating a high-resolution, virtual 30-inch image. It has VGA/SVGA input capability, but unfortuantely, this version costs $2599.00, which is a little bit expensive in my opinion.
If anyone can find more information on this product such as max. resolution, and number colors, please share it with us.
You can find this computer version here.
The prices might be going down on those HMD's, but i've had my solution now for a while. My Princeton Graphics EO75 shoulder-mounted display works wonders. I drag around my portable 750 watt gasoline-powered generator, and my killer APC UPS and bear the weight of my 47 pound monitor on my shoulders. It's a wonder for my six-pack, and damn, radiation... does a body good! I don't even need a nightlight anymore. And the CO from the generator is a breath of fresh air wherever I go. Complements never cease, from the "What the fsck is wrong with you?" to the "Damn, you're messed up." Walking in public is fun for the whole family. We don't need to go shopping anymore. People throw enough fruits and vegetables at us to last all week! Get your very own Shoulder-Mounted FST monitor today!!!
I cant confirm this, because I dont know where I got the information in the first place. Your brain has a mapping from parallax distance to focal length. That is it uses the parallax distance of an object to determine how to focus on it. With head mount displays "everything" is in focus (not just things at a given depth). There were some kids early on that were using this sort of technology (as part of a study or something) and after a while they lost that mapping (to some degree I am sure), and where unable to correctly focus on objects in the real world. One solution to this is to use gaze tracking to change the focal length of the image dynamicly, but I dont know if that would even work. I imagine you would need to have a sytem that can track the users gaze and change the focal length faster than a human can change the shape of the lense in thier eye. Unfortunately there are other such mappings that we dont have an understanding of and well have to find them out as well.
As a continuation, I had always thought that a solution could be doing depth of field in software and displaying the resultant image. You still need the gaze tracking hardware to figure out what the user is looking at and thus what depth should be in focus, but you wouldn't need the extra optical hardware, but now that I think about it this is of no use at all (well it would probably look pretty). The problem is that the blured image would still be completely in focus everyware. And once again, since your mind no longer has to keep track of focal lengths... disaster.