Computer Display Clips Onto Glasses

fluffhead wrote in to send us an article over at tech about Clip on Monitors. The real nifty thing is that this one allows you to see through it so you can super impose digital stuff over real life. Yum.

Comments

VR aplications in the works..

[eshefer]

I remember reading about Boing developing a system that combines this type of eye-display and a computer envirement that lets a techniction wire electrical componants in a plain.

The computer screen is aligned with real life and it highlights which wires go where.

I wonder if this has been developed further (I remember reading about it three or four years ago)

In my view these types of aplications- synergy of real life and CGI are is the real future of VR. think about playing Quake V in your living room. where monsters are hiding in the kitchen.
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[toolie]

Here comes Snow Crash. Where do I sign up? I wanna be there on opening day. =)

Focusing on something that close to your eye isnt a problem when its transparent. The way the goggles or HMDs work in attack/recon helicopters is that the glasses make it look like the symbology is superimposed over the real world. there is no conscious switching focal points (that i was ever aware of). Its really nifty and not nearly as hard as people think.

Ok, the only thing I can say about that last paragraph is that I know what I meant to say, but I don't know if anybody will be able to read what I meant :P

Cool but Caveat + hmd links

[isdale]

The MicroOptical glasses are nice and hopefully I'll get to check them out later this year. There are some problems with them:
- brightness, hard to see the image in daylight. The Microvision VRD is the only decently daylight readable, see through I've seen. The MO and MV folks should team up.
- fixed image location, makes it hard to do the IPD adjustments needed for good binocular HMD

Still they might be nice for a borg setup. I dont hold a lot of near-term hope for the registered-image uses (overlay directly on real objects). The head and position tracking issues are a long way from being solved, except in tightly controlled environments.

For more HMD links, check out http://vr.isdale.com/HMD_Vendors.htm
Thats where I keep my list, developed originally for my Tech Review articles for VR News magazine (http://www.vrnews.com)

Clarifications and Where it might go.

[GSearle]

To clear up some confusion, the article states that the virtual image can be adjusted to where you want it. The field of view is about 15 degrees, so the image gets larger as you make it more distant. I'd guess this would be like a 17" monitor at 2 1/2 feet.

When this technology matures and gets into mass manufacturing, it should get real cheap. Tiny LCD's are a lot less expensive than the big ones. If this gets cheaper than the old CRT, then we may even see CRT's go away. Imagine if the "wearable computer" displaced the desktop? This display might be the key.

This would look kinda funky -- a lot of people just sitting or standing there, staring at nothing, fiddling with some input device. We'll learn easily enough how to tell when someone is "on-line" or "off", not by the equipment they have (because it might be all but invisible), but just by looking at their manner.

It's great that this display doesn't block your view. It will definitely be used to enhance it. The only problem is if you just want to look at the display, you would have to stare at a wall or something.

Things for the future: TWO displays, one for each eye. Motion and position detection so the display moves as you do. Combine this with the "pulse" technology reported here previously, and imagine having your own personal radar. "See" through the fog, dark and even trees, brush, and walls while you drive. This could all happen within the next decade, and be had rather cheaply.