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Would You Wear Video Glasses?
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to EE Times, an Israeli company has developed a personal video display device that looks like a simple pair of glasses. You can use these glasses with various sources, such as a portable media player or your cell phone. This technology promises to eliminate the dizziness phenomenon usually associated with this kind of display. And with these glasses weighing only about 40 grams, you'll feel that you're viewing a 40-inch screen from a distance of 7 feet." Video screens embedded into eyewear isn't that new, but the footprint of these is smaller than what I've seen before, making them cooler to wear on the subway.
Much better to wear them while you're driving. At least more exciting.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I'd use them, but only in certain places.
Certainly never on a subway or any other public place where you should be alert to your surroundings. They'd be ideal for taking on a trip to use on a plane or in a hotel room.
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NSFWI remember seeing glasses video displays this small a decade ago. Of course the problem with them then, and even now, was resolution: The resolution was so terrible that it has limited uses, seriously degrading even the already low quality of television.
http://www.mirageinnovations.com/
no technology can survive without games and porn.
making them cooler to wear on the subway.
:-)
Because it's cool to wear shades underground.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
I worry about the long term effects on the eyes. You are constantly focusing on sonething only an inch or less from your eye, and the eye strain might have a negative effect over time. Remembering Steve Martin's movie 'The Jerk' where a device designed to keep your glasses from slipping down your nose eventually made everyone on the planet cross-eyed, I would use this but definitely limit my time.
A most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a bit.
From the TFA these glasses are being touted as a portable multimedia experience. With the (lack of) details on the websites it appears that wearing then will significantly fill out the users field of vision (which you would hope for in order to get the best viewing). So we have:
:D
1) Expensie tech (As in a couple of hundred)
2) Not physically large
3) Highly visible to everyone else that you are using it
4) Blocks out significant part of your own visual field (and also audio)
5) Designed to be used outside of your own home (as otherwise why use it)
In a private situation (or on a plane) these glasses would be OK, but wear them on the subway, or sit in the park and you might as well put up a banner that says "Mug me!!"
But a solution would be to put a web cam on top of the glasses, and feed it back into the system as a "picture in picture" so you can keep track of the outside world while you gasp at the unblelievable plot quality of m:i:III
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This is clearly a step forward and will lower the cost of wearable screens, we can just hope it's not as much vaporware as it sounds. I also have some issues with the whole wearable screen tech business: Every "videoglasses" producer has always promised 40" TV, for as long as these have been sold, but usually the let down is quality. You know a laptop 12" screen can also seem to be 40" as long as you have it close enough, and a laptop screen has better resolution.
I've used the Sony version that you plugged into a TV, and that version was very low res, about 400px in height. I'm not sure you can make "affordable" wearable displays with any good resolution. Even though Mirage, the makers of this device, are using a single OLED/LCD it still going to cost a lot to produce enough pixels to satisfy the eye.
And I can't figure out how my glasses are going to fit in there.
i agree, the pictures in article are in no way something that we can call normal glasses.
... at least none can complain about your `performance`, which otherwise would be disabled due to visual conflicts.
the man looks like a 5 feet superfly with enormous goggles.
but now imagine, going to bed with your wife when she is 50, then wearing the glasses and looking at some good old german 'romance' movie wouldn't be that bad at all
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
- Shaving or putting on makeup
- Reading the paper
- Using a laptop placed in the passenger seat
- Turning around to smack the kid in the back seat
But my personal favorite is the guy I saw playing the trumpet.I can hardly wait to enjoy dodging the guy who's using these to watch, say, the fighter chase inside the Death Star from Star Wars.
I think they tried too hard to make these look like regular sun glasses. I think they should add borders to the lenses, or something to proclaim that "No this guy isn't just wearing the most retarded sunglasses you've ever seen, but actually a nifty piece of technology."
They got the something light right, but until they can actually make these look like fashion wear, they shouldn't even try. It's like trying to make the ipod look like an earing. It would be big clunky, and ugly, but just trying to make the ipod look like an ipod has created a fashion trend in and of itself.
So far the only piece of wearable technology that can actually add cool points is something that's centuries old - The Wrist Watch
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
If the size of perceivable objects diminishing with distance is an inverse square relationship (as it is with light intensity...)
Forty inches at seven feet is equivalent to approximately one inch (.81 inches, to be precise) at one foot, which isn't that big. It'll fill most of field of vision, though (hold a ruler one inch from your eye and compare).
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you'll feel that you're viewing a 40-inch screen from a distance of 7 feet.
40 inches is about 1 meter. 7 feet is just above 2 meters.
It does not talk about resolution. I have 2 x 1600x1200 20", so 40" would be 4 times as large. However when I stand 7 feet away, it looks about 4 times smaller, making it standard.
So I guess they are saying it looks like a normal screen. They could have also said that it looked like a movie screen screen where you sit in the back of the teater.
Oh and 40 grams is about 1.4 ounce.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Kids would go crazy over this! Put on their "glasses" and cheat straight through the test.
Only at home behind closed and locked doors. And drawn curtains.
And even then, what would be the point? For the same money, I can buy a decent TV that 1) won't hurt my eyes, 2) friends can also enjoy, 3) doesn't requirement me to hide from the world because of how moronic I look.
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If this really were JUST like a simple pair of glasses, you could potentially do all sorts of things; coupled with a video scanning device, you could flip through a book, much faster than you could read it, and then google it from your glasses. Heck, you could get a HUD for real life, or zoom in on a far away object... especially with the shrinking size of high-resolution cameras, the possibilities seem almost endless.
I'm sure the military would be interested in some applications too.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Just an inverse relationship. So many ways to explain it... so little time.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
And to those of you who wouldn't dare using it in public because of the fear being mugged: I hope the mass production of these devices would make them as common as the earplugs everyone is using with their MP3-players nowadays.
)9TSS
I learned from personal experience a long, long time ago that big, weird-looking glasses make you look like a total dork.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Combine that with Apple's "display watches YOU" idea, add some software to figure out what part of the screen the person is looking at, add a button to click, connect it up to a (small, wearable) computer, and that would be a very cool computer.
Any laptop screen that is backlit is necessarily hugely inefficient. Only a tiny amount of the light that it produces will pass through your pupil into your eyes. A far higher proportion of the light these glasses produce would be likely to reach your eyes, so they could be made very bright yet draw only a few milliwatts of power.
Microprocessors and peripherals could in theory be made to be many times more efficient than they are today, but a 15" screen with a given brightness could not be made much more efficient than current OLED devices.
If these things really are comfortable, the next generation laptop could be made as small as its keyboard - and work for many days on a much lighter battery.
Then you could get a date while wearing them.
Sadly, with these that will never happen.
The ______ Agenda
I used to work for a company that had, as one of it's products, several similar type heads-up type displays (around 1995 or so). The problem we ran into with all our models, prolonged use (a couple of 8 hour shifts, a few days in a row) would start to cause eye strain. We eventually had to pull all the products from the market, because the risk/reward ratio for using them was just not worth it. I'd be curious to see if the next generation of such devices still have similar issues.
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.