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Linux-Based PMP Features Head-Up Display
nerdyH writes "A new Linux-based portable media player (PMP) features an eyeglass-like head-mounted display with 800 x 600 resolution. Dreamax's Indicube i-800 PMP provides an experience similar to sitting two meters away from a 54-inch screen, the vendor claims. It uses an 0.44-inch eMagin OLED display, claimed to offer the smallest pixel pitch in the industry."
porn on the train at last (and this time without angry guards and annoyed passengers)
Strange Days!
...and it should be known by now
I've wanted something like this to use with my PDA for some time.
I am trolling
2008 will be the year of the Linux Borg Headgear.
Now I can look like a complete tool without using proprietary software.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
I fear this visor will only look good on hot Asian women.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
How come these designers never realize that many of their target audience have poor eyesight? These types of things never fit right over glasses.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
But can it give me the equivalent of 17" CRT at arms length?
Whenever I see these, I think "yay, monitor replacement" until I find out that, like most of them, it is just as fuzzy for reading text as a regular TV.
One thing I missed on the feature list: bluetooth.
Combine this with one-handed chording keyboard, maybe a camera or just a hole to look through (or allow one-eye option) and some wireless connectivity (say, your mobile phone as GPRS modem), and you have a lightweight wearable computer.
bonus for whoever comes up with a handy wearable cursor control device - kinda trackpoint on the keyboard would do, but they are quite obnoxious.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Are there two screens (one per eye) or one for both? If it's two screens then if I'm not mistaken it'd be the first PMP with 3d capabilities, which IMO would be pretty impressive.
Why? This sucks.
Since when are googles head-up displays?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...and cue the Geordi LaForge jokes in 3-2-1
I've worked on micro display projects before --- and you don't want the pixel pitch getting too close to the wavelength of light -- which will be around 1/2 micron. Pixels smaller than a micron or so will result in dispersion of the light that is generated, limiting the quality of the image.
The technology isn't quite there yet, if 800 x 600 is the best it can do. We generally run 1200 x 1040 as a minimum on our conference room big screens, and the average seat is at least 10 feet away.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
I mean, does it offer translucency?
A little off topic, but with how linux friendly slashdot is, I wonder what percentage of users read slashdot on linux machines.
The realm of 'wearable computing' seems particularly prone to vapourware. For example, check out this awesome device, which has been babbled about for years, and which you still can't buy in stores. And this PMP thing... well, you can't buy it in stores yet either.
Yawn. Wake me when it's available for immediate shipment, with an actual price tag.
Seriously, I'm sick and tired of Slashdot stories slashvertising gadgets that ARE NOT EVEN AVAILABLE YET and may, in fact, never be. Like this damned thing.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Just curious here... I am (very slightly) far sighted.
It is incredibly difficult and hurts the eyes to try and focus on anything of about 4 inches away... would this still work for someone like me? Or am I out of luck?
At the moment a lot of Chinese manufacturers are making these PMP with head-mounted display products - these things were already available wholesale at least 2 months ago.
I suspect the fact that one of these things makes you look like a hard-core fan of a certain science fiction TV series imitating a certain weak-sighted character is probably not helping with it's adoption.
If you're really into portable media players you're probably better off with any of the flash memory based 2.4'' MP4 player which supports Divx and Xvid.
... as a guy who has a fair bit of difficulty scoring with attractive women, I am really looking forward to the possibility of banging ugly chicks while watching hot porn.
Finally, technology that helps me in important ways.
Can this thing explode? Also I feel dizzy when watch something too closely.
jpenguin AT the google email service
to rehash the old joke...
you get home, put on the ol' Indicube and immerse yourself totally in the audio and video of your favorite p*rnstar doing what she does. there you are, she's 2m away in glorious full OLED color and resolution as you are cranking away....
you remove the headphones to find your mum has been in and left tea and biscuits on the side table whilst you were busy.
on a more serious note, add sound canceling headphones and I can see a use for this on a long haul flight.
Yes, a 15 inch monitor (15.4 to be more precise) on your desk 2 feet in front of you has the same field of view. Somehow the sales tag "Like a 15 inch monitor on your desk" doesn't sound quite as impressive. This is one of my pet peeves. You always hear manufacturers explaining how their tiny FOV eyepiece is like an enormous screen at some equally enormous distance. They just pick a distance which coincides with an impressive sounding screen size. If they give you a distance in feet, just divide the screen size by the distance, then multiply by 2. That will give you the equivalent monitor size (2 feet in front of you).
The FOV of this device is actually a bit better than a many I have seen. They often come out as being equivalent to 14 inch monitors rather than 15 inch monitors. It's nice that it can play HD movies but a bit of a shame that the screen is way below HD resolution, making such an exercise fairly pointless.
Since the early 90s I been waiting for an affordable head mounted display (HMD) with a human-like field of view, and sadly I'm still waiting. Even the unaffordable ones have pretty crummy FOVs. Still, if any kind of HMD becomes popular (no matter how poor) it can only be a good thing in the long run. It's bound to result in better products before long.
The summary calls it a HUD, the article calls it a HMD. The article is right.
-Peter
How funny. What the hell for they need to put Linux into *this*? And who gonna buy it? Like... "I`m such a fan of Linux, that it even runs my portable dvd player"... Crap.
I'll wait for normal-looking sunglasses with embedded OLED displays. Sony has a prototype flexible and translucent OLED display, so I'm sure it can be done. It'll probably be something that Oakley will be first to market with.
..the hype of VR died away, and then the technology to make it good came along.
I've got a set of eMagin glasses (can't remember what model, but they're not new) - and playing racing games on them is incredible super-awesome fun. The problem with most racing games is you never feel like you're going fast, but with the glasses you get a great, wonderful feeling of speed (enough so that the game itself is just a bonus).
My prediction: One day quite soon here, people will re-discover VR and it will be huge. The tech is all ready to go, it's just nobody seems to be taking hold of it (I guess nobody wants to produce the next Virtual Boy).
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
...until you start crashing into junk.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Here's an experiment to demonstrate the problem. Start reading a (physical) page of text. Bring the page in until it touches your nose. Can you still read anything? Unless you are horribly nearsighted you probably began straining around 8-10 inches, and lost focus entirely at 6-8 inches. I am about 20/400 in my good eye, the closest I can read is at 4 inches with my glasses off.
Is there an optometrist in the house who can explain how these displays work, and whether or not they are healthy for your eyes?
More music, fewer hits
Moving your head and having the picture stay still will probably be quite nauseating. They need head tracking built in, which means it can't be automatically integrated into games. Same for 3d movies--this is the main distraction when I watch them. Maybe a head brace will solve all this?
I tried one of these and it's really cool (it must be expensive though). The image quality is very good. The only thing that bothered me a little about it was that the room was bright and the light was bothering me and distracting me from the video. But I was told that there is another device that you can put around the player to block outside lights.
Overall I found it nice, although it's not really the way I enjoy watching my movies.
-FL
What I hope will be built someday is something which rear-projects the image onto the glasses, though I am not sure if that will ever result in a clear picture on the retina.
;-)
Best of course would be a laser projected image (pre-warped to compensate for the spherical geometry of the eye) *directly* onto the retina, well, second best, but I wouldn't bet anything on a direct neural interface (eye-nerve or deeper).
And now, poke holes into my dreams, make my universe collapse, see if i care
> an eyeglass-like head-mounted display with 800 x 600 resolution. Dreamax's Indicube
> i-800 PMP provides an experience similar to sitting two meters away from a 54-inch screen
I think he meant to say provides an experience similar to sitting two decades away from a "super" VGA screen.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
What I really want: some FPS running in real 3D with some of these. That kind of glasses display already existed, but with a 320*240 res (worse than TV!) (for exemple:http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5998). 800*600 is MUCH better. But I'm not about the connectic: will you have one or two cables to plug?
My dream: a 1280*1024 pair, with two cable, and an option in most game so that it calculates two distinct images of the scene at 6.5cm distance, and output them on two output of your graphic card. That's as immersive as it get, way better than those motion capture thingy for your head or a 3 monitor setup. You could see imediatly if an object is far or closejust as in real life!
What I mean with this overly detailed description is that all the technology is in place, but I apparently am the only one to consider it a majer step up for game to have full 3D. I mean, it would be so much better than a hhigher resolution or even better shaders.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
is to combine this with an webcam facing outwards with 10x optical zoom. pressing a button on the side of the visor and presto it turns into binoculars, or have it display a picture-in-picture (even maybe have a webcam looking behind you?).
Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
Suspected Terrorist
How about an affordable, wearable, 800x600 display that I can use with my broken laptop to turn it into a cyberdeck! a.k.a. a wearable monitor... We don't want to watch movies on the train... We want to kill people! Here's an idea, take a 800x480 (n800 || psp size) lcd w/controller and package it with as little bulk as possible (yes I realize there may be some bulkiness involved) and sell it to us with a webcam that can be used to overlay data on the world and as a multitouch like this dude did with the wiimote Wii-mote Hack Adds Multitouch Without the "Touch"; Now we have a cyberdeck! w/ VR controls! Yes I realize the z800 does this with head tracking but if you could get the form factor of this PMP... OH Baby! I'd bust out the buckz!
Sitting in the train, minding your own business, with your cool eyeglasses on, and then somebody snitches your bag, coat, shoes and everything else you're not paying attention to :-D
Quack damn you!
... and want their crappy ideas back.
they've re-invented the i-Glasses. Yay. Resolution was the same as the nicer, later ones.
"Give me my money, bitch!"
"F*#% you!"
"SUDO give my money, bitch!"
Of course, inspired by this.
My brother brought some glasses like this back from Japan almost 10 years ago. They were a bit more clunky than these, and had to be hooked up to a video device to watch anything (s-video, iirc).
They were a bit of fun (especially hooked up to a camcorder (especially with some drugs involved)), and the picture was decent enough.
I tried to watch a movie on them exactly once, but the eyestrain and resulting headache were too much, and I'm not prone to either.
I probably still have them sitting in a box somewhere... I should break them out and put them up on e-bay!
When I saw this all I could think of is Johnny Lee's Wii-mote head tracking combined for some surely immersive games! And all on a shoestring budget!
good as the hardware and the tech may be, mentioning "linux" and "new" is a sure way of getting appprooval and hits with /. . Though linux is the best fad we have (and i like ubuntu) it is way too kludgy. -X anyone?-. amiga and beos are still too closer to my heart.
anyway... $;$8/6%
the monitor in a pair of shades thing is everywhere already. why is this on the front page? oh, because it's linsux.
even your moron misfit king has gotten wise and given up on linux. he went apple. why don't you guys just let this die a peaceful death instead of becoming the next bunch of babbling amiga zealots?
the operating systems war isn't over yet but linux is quickly going the way of beos.
In a world where 1080p is fast becoming the norm, 800x600 gives you the experience of sitting 5-10 years back.
I'm a long haul trucker and I have to say these things are a life-saver. Instead of nodding off at the wheel like I used to, now I can watch a handful of movies as I drive between Chicago and LA.
According to http://www.indicube.com/product_3.htm, "It supports almost popular video and audio files".
Still no love for the unpopular files, though.
No Snow Crash References yet?!
Now all I need is a storage container...
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
And what is wrong with 800 by 600? That is what I use with my ub3r-l33t 900 MHz, 256 MB, 150-watt power supply machine.
If you say that too loudly, the giant plasma screen TV industry might go out of business.
I was thinking about buying a plasma/LCD for my bedroom the other day so I could watch some stuff before drifting off. However before I did that I tried my laptop, which of course works perfectly, although finding a comfortable position is a little tricky - it gets quite hot and its like 25-30 celcius at night in my bedroom anyway, so I don't need to get hotter.
However, screen-size wise - I lined up the monitor to where a TV would sit in my room and realised that if I had (say) a 42" plasma, my laptop monitor (12.1") would still give me a bigger apparent picture size, as its so much closer to my head.
I want that!
Oh, and with the glasses, too, please!
In Wii, the more precise movements (i.e. the movement tracking appropriate to aiming) are based on the ir camera functions to gauge relative position to a fixed reference point (screen) being targeted. The accelerometers alone probably wouldn't be utilized to the same effect. Accelerometers to track the pitch and roll of your head may help in aiming, but the left-to-right movements could be tricky. At least with tilting forward and backward you have gravity as a reference point, rotating the direction of looking gives no absolute reference point, so it could easily get messed up, I'd think. And if trying to do aiming and such, you'd need to track your hand movement in a way that is very cognizant of distance and position relative to the head.
In other words, immersive gaming needs a good reference (or set of reference points) to calibrate the relative accelerometer data. Maybe an array of IR emitters strategicly placed around the play area emitting unique data to complement accelerometer data...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Because of the initial broken English, I was put a little bit on guard parsing the rest of it. Hmm, do they mean "can decode most (codecs [which are] sufficient to play HD videos) easily"? It almost looks like they're ipmlying "can decode (most codecs) [in a way which is] sufficient to play HD videos easily"?
Because I honestly don't see the point of putting a real HD video on this device. Thus, it's obvious that they mean it can play h.264 and such, which is great, but every new device can do that now, so it's obvious that they're only mentioning HD to try to ride the HD marketing hype.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
At the end of the article is a link for more info...which goes to a Flash-hindered site which doesn't display on Ubuntu.
You mean it's blurry and gives me a headache? Alright, sign me up!
Because we certainly don't want to talk about cool technology and gadgets on a geek website. If you just want stuff you can buy now you're better off sticking to Amazon.
What happens when a potentially new product uses bad translation software?
"Hands free
You don't have to keep holding the machine up to watch movies no more during movies continue. Just wear the multimedia glasses and watch a movie at ease. You can feel the most feeling of freedom by being hands free with see-around environment maintaining complete awareness of surrounding status."
Would be fun to connect an infra-red camera and pretend you're Predator. Of course, you wouldn't be able to see anything covered with a thin layer of mud.
But where do I download the source from?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." -Pravin Lal
It may be that we got a female on this forum who is into the more advanced forms of self pleasure... Oh right. Forgot, this is slashdot. No females.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is just what I need. People really don't already have enough visual cues that I'm a total fucking asshole. Please, let this hit local stores ASAP. Oakley Blades have become cliche and just aren't providing the oomph they used to.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
offtopic:
Actually, the parent post and my comment in response were actually as much spoiler as what came after, and you still have no idea from all of it together about the main plot of the film. It's a pretty good one for geeks, so I'd recommend it. I own a DVD (yes, a legit factory-stamped one) of it and pull it out about every 4 months.
Yea, I realize the complaint. Marketing types are sharks. However, out of everyone here bitching about the display being like a 15 inch monitor, would you care to compare this to other PMP displays? Sometimes I wonder if people only post here because they found one little thing that they can bitch about.
Here's a clue stick This PMP isn't meant to replace your gaming/video editing machine! Out of all the PMP's I have read about, this display is vastly larger than any of them. Is it that much of a pain to say, "Wow! That's pretty cool", even if it is vapor-ish?
In terms of a portable video system, it's clearly better than the rest (if it works as stated). It's just that I've been waiting for VR Goggles for over a decade and they always suck. Hopefully research and development will pick up speed now.
Most of them have sucked for various reasons. Sometimes cheap parts were used to keep the price affordable by upper middle class. Other times the technology just wasn't up to par with the idea. However, I think the real reason why it hasn't taken off is due to liability. When I was researching VR goggles/HMD's I found several articles where test users experienced vertigo and flashback days after the test trials; while walking down the street not wearing a display.
If I were a manufacturer, that would stop me right there!