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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 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.