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Sony's Head Mounted Display (Cont)
madsatcom noted that
the Sony Head Mounted Monitor that we mentioned awhile back
is actually available now
on the Sony Website. I can't find a resolution on that page,
but it simulates a 30" screen, weighs 4.2 ounces, and costs
a woppin' $2600... If anyone at Sony is reading, repeat after
me: "Rob Must Test One of These Screens. Contact Him Now And
Offer Him a Sample Unit". Seriously, wearable computing is
getting closer, it just ain't getting much cheaper.
Posted by Mike@ABC:
Why don't we just have a microphone on there and a voice-recongition system. (Before I get flamed, yes, they aren't 100 percent reliable. Neither is my typing.)
Get these goggles, a mike, a small screen with handwriting-recognition (the Calligraphy software on Vadem's Clio is great) to wear on your arm, and a CPU/memory/storage unit to clip on the belt. Anybody out there build this yet? It's do-able, I'd imagine.
Of course, there's always the possibility of walking into walls while communing with your computer.
Tried one like it when I worked for another company that made HMD's (The defunct Virtual IO) I was not impressed, resolution is the key.
When they can do 800 x 600 without fancy double scaning or other faux resolution enhancements, I might be interested.
Head tracking is important and the Sony does not seem to have any.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
On the other hand, there have been lots of nifty things going on in wearable-land lately, and it is indeed getting cheaper. You can put together a pentium-class truly wearable system these days for about the cost of a good desktop machine. Check out EMJ ( http://emjembedded.com) and for a truly wearable HMD, look at microooptical ( http://microopticalcorp.com), or at tekgear for the M1 ( http://tekgear.ca). The HMD's are both greyscale QVGA now, but the M2 is expected to be out in a year or so (?) and is projected to be 16M color 800x600, and MicroOptical is also working on a color high-res version of their display.
Make no mistake, wearable computing (IMHO) will be The Next Really Big Thing in computing, sort of akin to the PC in the late 70's-early 80's or the internet in this decade. This won't be for maybe another five years, but those of you who want to be in on the ground floor, start hacking now! :-)
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There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
"Note: This product should not be used by children age 15 or younger. Individuals with eye or heart disease or injury or high blood pressure should consult a doctor prior to use."
May cause death, epilepsy, impotence, fondness for Microsoft Works, dislike of Warner Bros. cartoons.
But apart from that it's great.
From the specs page
I can't remember which TV show it was but they had a huge warning about these types of things. It seems that if you wear it for too long it can screw you up for when you take it off. It had something to do with the frame rate (so to speak) that our brains sees the natural world and what these things can provide. Once you brain got used to seeing things through these viewers, it had a hard time going back to normal. They were doing tests in one of the Disney places (world, land ?) and people who tested these new arcade games complained of dizziness and disorientation after leaving the game. They also reported that a few games were removed because of this. Does anyone remember seeing this? It was within the last 2 weeks. I'm in Canada so I don't know if you Americans saw it or not.
I don't know how real this is or whether it includes these devices but thought I'd add my 2 cents.
Since it's using LCD, it will have 832*624*3 = 1.55M dots. Someone's just forgotten the decimal point. However, this may mean that LCD sub-pixel rendering (see www.grc.com/cleartype.htm) giving an effective 2496 dot horizontal resolution for anti-aliased text.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
If you remove the need for a screen from a laptop and add a second power source to power the replacement then you can cram more oomph into the same size box and it should last longer as well. The only problem I can see is I would need to learn to touch type as I would not be able to see the keyboard.
Alternatively if you use a chord input device - once considered to be the way to go - you can make the portable any shpae you want as you are nolonger hampered by screen or keyboard.
And thirdly if you want to save space then a monitorless desk is smaller and less costly than the current set up in trading floors... you add the motion sensor and you can pan through multiple screens answer the phone etc., etc. The merchant banks currently throw large amounts of money at getting more people onto their trading floors so the price would be no obstacle.
If the are going to put in independant lcds for the two eyes. Why not got the small extra effort and make the thing stereoscopic. For $2600 I want a whole new quake experience. at 800x600 the
TNT2Ultras could display at 30+ FPS independantly to each eye. They could use the gizmo in the new microsoft gamepad to do the head tracking.
Sorry to burst everyone's bubble here, but I've seen and played with this cool looking toy.
Sony actually started selling this exact head-mounted disply with their portable DVD player, only diff was minus the VGA/Composite/Svid converter box. Whats worse tho, you can buy the "DVD-Tron" at home theater shops for $1200, Same goggles, plus a REALLY nice portable DVD player. (or $799 if not sold as a kit!) I really don't know what Sony is thinking here with their $2400 price tag...
As far as quality, well, I wasn't impressed. Much better than head displays I've seen before, but these thing STILL have a long way to go.