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Goggles Simulate 52-inch TV
al-bob writes "Sony introduced at PC Expo a set of
goggles that simulate a 52-inch monitor viewed from 6 feet away, including surround sound. Each color LCD display has a resolution of 180K pixels and they can be switched to see-thru and are AC/DC. Quite a cool bit of technology, but it costs $899! "
Of course, $899 is a bargain for a 52 inch screen. The resolution
isn't quite up to snuff for hi-res computing, but hopefully
it isn't far off. I'm stoked to try a pair- but they won't
be available until september.
Update: 06/24 12:47 by CT : Sam Livingston
mentioned that an 800x600 version
will be available for $2600 too. Still cheaper than a 52" monitor...
I owned a pair of I-glasses, and actually enjoyed them quite a bit. I tried the version that has a VGA input, but the resolution on them was not quite good enough to use a dos window, and there was some clipping on the edges which made things even harder to use. For watching movies, though, they were pretty cool.
:)
Weird moment: Sitting at home late one night in the dark with my VR goggles strapped on my head watching the scene in "Strange Days" where someone in the movie goes home late one night, straps on some VR playback machine and sits in the dark watching movies. Of course, the scene is supposed to show how lonely and isolated that guy is...
I've used Sony's Glasstron, too, when I was in Tokyo last year and stopped by the Sony store. It seemed to be about the same as the I-glasses. I even picked up the brochure that they have for them, but it's in Japanese, and I don't have it scanned in. The big difference seems to be that Sony's version uses batteries.
Damn HTML formatting conversion of special characters! http://www.sel.sony.com/SEL/consumer/ss5/home/camc order/camcorderaccessories/plm-a55_specs .shtml is the URL... Copy and paste it
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
Other then my wearable, watching a porno-flik ;)
via goggles is wonderful cuz nobody can catch you
doing it
They do, see www.mimi.com
Actually Sony has two versions of these. The ones you saw, which have been out since the begining of the year, and these new ones. The new ones apparantly have bigger view area, better colors and transparancy option
With the lack of a correct horizon reference, your Vestibular Ocular Response will be totally fouled up. I.E. these things will give you the worst case of motion sickness you can imagine! This limits the use of the units as a Hi8 Walkman eyephone.
http://www.etown.com/buy/go/tv/articles/sonyplma55 swa.html
>The thing they were showing didn't look like that.
>It had the same high-tech sort of cheesy look, but
>that's not it. Maybe its more advanced now?
That picture IS the latest model, it was scanned from a Japanese magazine that focuses on new electronics products. That photograph is only about 3 months old.
There is an older model of the Glasstron, it is a slightly different form factor, but its the same technology. The older unit was a flop in the Japanese market, maybe SONY is dumping the older units?
BTW, the photo does not show the heavy, clunky box attached to the Glasstron with cables. You are supposed to wear it on your belt, I suppose, but with batteries sufficient for prolonged use, you better wear suspenders too, or your pants will fall down!
I have a far more useful application for these lightweight glasses than movies or porn or laptops or video games:
some of us need them in real life.
7 years ago in a car wreck I had severe damage to the orbit of my left eye (all 4 walls; that's bad). Anyway, the eye is fine, and the optic nerve had little damage, but the muscles were permanently damaged, and they're not the kind of thing that can be repaired with transplants or anything else. So, like many people who have a bad eye (which is more commonly an eye that always points either out or in, a "lazy eye"), my eyes aren't aligned, preventing me from having proper depth perception or peripheral vision (which makes sports and driving a nightmare; you don't find half-blind guys in the NBA!). There are probably a ton of people in the same state; you normally don't notice because most of us wear sunglasses day and night to avoid stupid comments. I only wear an eye patch when I perform with my rock group, since it's more appropriate then.
As these lightweight LCD glasses improve in resolution, the possibility improves of someone building a pair which would supply a real-time image transformation (in combination with a really high-res CCD or other mini-camera, and a good set of DSP's) for the bad eye so that all of us with a bad eye could see correctly again (thus it would only need the LCD on one side, improving the cost). Normally the mind blocks out the image of the bad eye, but with image alignment it becomes useful again.
I'm not sure what resolution, refresh rate, and color depth it would need to be useful, but I would guess at least 1024 x something, 16-bit as a bare minimum. I'm more of a programmer than an electronics guy, but I may end up trying to organize such a thing myself if somebody else doesn't.
If you provided a separate channel for left & right eyes, then you could have stereoscopic vision. Slap on a couple data gloves. Have the computer project an image of a virtual keyboard in front of you. Touch type (or hunt 'n' peck). Now there's an image as people walk down the street.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
Lemme know when the display's 1280x720, and I can attach a portable DVD with integrated line tripler...
Cheers,
The page I'm looking at on sony's site says that the goggles are $2599.00.
I can't connect to the site listed on your message either.
The specs for these glasses say 'virtual 30" screen' and not 52", maybe these are two/three different sets of glasstrons... doesn't seem likely though.
If you check out the actual sony specs (at http://www.sel.sony.com/SEL/consumer/ss5/portable/ camcorder/camcorderacc essories/plm-a55_specs.shtml), you'll see that the actual resolution of each LCD is 800x255, on a .7" LCD. The input is a standard NTSC RCA plug, so I don't know how they fit the 4:3 aspect ratio into this resolution.
Another cool feature is the viewing mode adjustment. Apparently there's a shutter, so you can close it for movie viewing or such, and open it so you can also see what's going on IRL, which would be more appropriate for wearables-style apps.
Y'know, looking at the picture, doesn't this remind you a whole lot of the chick from Neuromancer, with the built-in silver sunglasses? Get these surgically implanted and you're set!
Just curious. :)
Especially those new multi-angle DVD titles I saw last week that let you switch cameras on the fly. Could be dangerous...
I can see the fnords!
Here we go:/ camcorder/camcorderacc essories/plm-a55_specs.shtml
http://www.sel.sony.com/SEL/consumer/ss5/portable
HELP! Slashdot is busted! The above link should NOT have as space in "plm-a55", and doesn't as I write it, but the preview has a space there. Get rid of that space, and send a nasty note to CmdrTaco.
The other Glasstrons, for computer use, are here:
http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/prod ucts/av/glasstron/
They have 832x624 resolution, and support HD15 as well as RCA inputs. However, they're $2600 as opposed to $800.
Posted by kodokan:
They are available in San Francisco at the Sony Style store in the Metreon. You can try them there and you can buy them
I'm sure you meant pasive, not active... But these are active matrix (I've viewed the old old version at a local sony store. Fine for TV and ok for movies. Don't even dare use them on your computer unless you like 320x200 mode...). I've heard someone mention about sound that sucked. Not only did I not see such a feature on the glasstron I tried, but who gives a shit? You're buying them as a TV replacement, not sound replacement... Just go out and buy some good 'phones separate...
Sure, mathematically they might be the same, but because of our depth perception, we are able to determine how large something actually is. I'm sitting about a foot and a half away from a 21" monitor right now, and downstairs I have a 52" tv which I sit at least six feet away from. Although the 21" monitor may take up more of my field of vision, the 52" screen still appears to be larger and is more appealing to watch. Sure, this may just be a psychological effect, but I'm sure most people would rather watch a movie from the back row of movie theater than sitting close to a 25" television regardless of field of vision.
Or just damned poor resolution right in front of your eyes.
Life is like an egg better scrambled than fried. -- Ken Sawatari
It sounds like with only 1 video connector you can't address the left/right LCD screens separately. That's ashame, two video inputs would be great for stereo image viewing.
Two eyes. Two video inputs. Two video cards. That much closer to virtual reality...
Take a Gyropoint mouse, the kind with an internal gyro, and duct tape it to your head. They're cheap, and work well enough.
Divide 800 by 3 to get colour.... ;-)
See www.i-glasses.com. Last they mailed me,
they said they had HI-res for $2000.
hah, i'm surprised no one else has thought of this... There was the previous discussion of rats that move a robotic arm using an invasive procedure.... and then the one about moving a house pointer with just electrodes strapped to your head.... so, you just stick a few 'trodes on the headset, and whamo, there's your input device:)
But is this the same?
Because this is called Glasstron but is 25 hundred
not 9 hundred dollars. Strange to me.
picture
010110000010110101010100011110010111000001100101
There are two models, one is for vhs type movies, and its cheap, and the resolution blows. It just gave me a headache. But its still better than the couple of other competitors out there.
The other one is the super one. The $899 one. Its been on sale in Japan for about a year I think, typical, they get all the hot stuff first, and give it to the yanks when they are bored with playing with it. (you watch.. wait 6 months and the shops will be full of whizzy computer+screen combos that look like they came off the enterprise, well, they have been all over the shops in Tokyo for over a year.... their latest crazy is jazzy designer coloured bookshelf MD/stereo systems. Like, a given model has a dozen different color designs and plugs together like lego. They will ship em over to the US some time in the year 2000 I expect). Anyway I digress, I tried the expensive ones on also. Had wet dreams of playstation games on a perceived 52" screen etc in hires computer monitor quality, just me and the game etc. The demo had a 1200x1024 desktop displayd. It was readable but not perfect. It was also a windows desktop, which contributed to the splitting headache I was getting playing around with them. The instructions say clearly dont use them for extended periods, like, longer than an hour or something tiny like that. Something about the eye getting fooled seems to cause a nausea reaction. You can turn up and down the translucency, so you can still see Real Life if need be.
Nice, but, hmm, try them first.
This does not bode well.
and like the other guy whoever he was. 52@72 = 13@18
My 15" @ 1280*768 looks great by comparison.
Hardware in a closed economic system... $...
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Acturlly they have been in the European product catalog for about a year...
So no. It's not really a new Sony product
Not that impressive. Oh, wait. I suppose they are actually equivalent to an 8 mile diagonal monitor at 11 miles. Now THATs impressive.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
I get wary when people start saying "simulates" and "virtual" size, or similar.
If you actually thought about it, who on Earth sits 6 FEET from their screen? I happen to sit 700mm from my 20" screen and I see exactly the same size screen as a 52" screen placed 6 feet away. Big deal. And it's not like you can make the screen bigger or anything. They COULD have also said: 76" screen viewed at 8.5 feet....
Anyone can get a 20" for around $850.
Once again, we have a mickey mouse toy that only ppl with serious mulla would like to waste their money on.
Onei
Virtual IO has had a product called iGlasses for a while now (atleast 2 years i think more like 3) but now they have an enhanced version with twice the res for only $799 the price they have always been so i dont know what all the hoopla is about the sony ones it seems sony has a way of creating hype over a product that isint really that new or cool i know that the AIBO robot dog is really cool but damn its just and over priced Tamagotchi... what happens when you program it for love (so it seeks out attention or someone to play with it) and it starts to get annoying??? thats a real expensive Toy that will have an A.D.D. Factor all of about 10 days then it goes in the closet with the rest of my "gotta have" gadgets... any one remember the robot that apple made back in the 80's that was cool i wish i could remember the name and find one possibly on ebay any one who know's what i'm talkin bout send me an email
hey whats she doing with that candlestick and those oreo cookies... ewwwww
actually the price isn't bad considering the
current VIAO headsets go for either $2499 or
$2599 list... I may actually pick up a pair of
these...
Wonderful. With this and Everquest, I may never leave the house again. Gonna have to find a real comfy chair.
The only thing that would be missing would be a head mount gyro system to simulate a mouselook. Any ideas on this one?
reveals that a 52" monitor viewed 72" away occupies the same field of vision as an 13" monitor viewed 18" away.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
WOW...sounds like a great new toy for long trips. Not so sure how it will sell for normal use though, considering most people like watching movies with others and not alone.
I can't imagine what the effect that lets you see the outside world too would look like...can't wait to try them!
This is really REALLY old news. I tried the Glasstron in Tokyo over 2 years ago. If you want to see a picture of the Glasstron, check out my website at:
m l
http://soli.inav.net/~ceicher/pages/gadgets2.ht
They weren't letting people try it when I walked by, they were just giving a chat about it. I didn't think to stick around and see if they were demoing it.
Anyone else here go to PC Expo and find it as much of a disappointment as I? Not much new or interesting things there this year.
The resolution on these puppies is terrible. What is it, like 512x384 (NTSC???) or something? I thought sony already had glasses with 800x600 resolution?
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
180k pixels puts this somewhere just below NTSC resolution. For reference, a 1024x768 monitor has 786,432 pixels next to this things 180000. Ntsc is around 512x384, or about 197k pixels.
Not particularly impressive, esp. for 900 clams.
I'm sure many others will point out that there are lots of headset type of displays out there better than this.
In fact, the nice thing about this type of article is that you wind up with a list of lots of URLs to similar products.
It would be nice to find out a little more about these glasses from a technical point of view...180k pixels means less than 512x384 resolution. If the refresh rate isn't high enough we could also have problems that plagued the old active matrix displays...that of latency and ghosting. Anyone have links to more info?
Some people have mentioned that the resolution is pretty poor, with which I agree. But are you going to be connecting something like this to your video card? Probably not.
Doesn't it make more sense to use it in other applications? I'm not sure what Sony had in mind when designing this, but it seems it would be better for these kinds of applications:
1. Wearable computers. Ie; a device with a wireless Internet link. Are you going to try doing a multipage layout using goggles? Probably not. But what about checking your email? Sounds more likely, I guess.
2. PDA-style apps: Palm meets goggles? Or, umm, Palm *in* goggles? Could be cool. You just go around wearing these goggles (should make for interesting scenes in downtown LA) that overlay your Palm screen with what you would normally see. Sounds pretty cool... no more groping for the holster on your belt. I'm not sure about data entry via this method, but still, could be cool.
3. Television/etc...: 512x384 of true pixel resolution sure isn't bad for television watching. In fact, it is pretty good. Depending on the focus depth of the image, it could turn out that you'd enjoy this more than your present television set. Especially with surround sound embedded right in.
Although I'm wondering how they've simulated a center channel speaker...
--globalnap.net, product of pure caffeine--
The wearables movement keeps rocking on.
I have a condition which weakens my muscles, making a laptop a bitch for me to carry around. I am drooling in anticipation for my first wearables.
Besides those with handicaps of any kind, wearables will be IT for the business traveller.
I though, would like one to use during the day for work. Those glasses would be a godsend!
BTW, does anyone know if these will work with the new Powerbook with the detachable screen coming out??
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
The article says it simulates viewing a 52" TV from 6.5' away. Correcting my math for 78" separation, this is the same as a 12" monitor (albeit with very high resolution).
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
http://www.sel.sony.com/SEL/consumer/ss5/home/camc order/camcorderaccessories/plm-a55_specs .shtml
So when does the Quake mod come out for Real Life? :)
At least one of those store front Manhattan stores
that sell all manner of electronica had these in the front window. On Monday...
"You're either outstanding, or outprocessing"
I have seen those in several video equipment stores here in NYC, usually in the $500 to $600 range.
Here is one example.
Later.
It's like viewing a 10 story screen from 150 feet away!
I bought my this past March. I located a
:)
distributor.. it took a while for delivery since
he had to specially order them from Sony and I got
them for $600, instead of Sony's $800. The
batteries are expensive my 12 hour Lithium Ions
cost $140 each and the charger was $120. The
Glasstron comes with charger; however, for my
wearable computer I needed to charge multiple
batteries at once.
They do 640x480 fairly well with the AiTech
Pocket Scan Converter (aitech.com, $75), however
the Glasstron crops the sides of the image..
requiring your to hack your X modeline entries.
With my 3dfx card I couldn't get it to work with
quake3, however with a bit of hacking Im sure it
would be possible. The main problem was the lack
of a hz chooser (my NTSC > VGA converter requires
60hz) However since my last attempt I found a
glide configuration tool (glide control center)
which may help if I choose to try it again
The ZDNet article has an incorrect price for the goggles. The price as shown by Sony's page on the goggles, is $799.
Just thought I'd mention that.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
I haven't used them myself but I've seen from several usenet posts that these are generally considered of better quality and more comfortable. Appear to be the same resolution as the Glasstron.
http://www.i-glasses.com
As for the article saying that they'd be available in September...um, they're available right now. If I wanted to drop $900 + tax, I could have walked home with one yesterday. Metreon had about 20 in boxes.
One thing that wasn't mentioned is that the Glasstron demoed at PC Expo is only the low-end model. There is a second, higher-end (and much more expensive) Glasstron, the PLM-S700 PC. The PLM-S700 can do up to 832x624, and has a VGA connector in addition to the NTSC/PAL inputs. I haven't been able to take that one for a test drive, but the MSRP on it is $2600. You can see the specs on it at http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/produ cts/av/glasstron/.