Re: A HMD as a movable window on a larger (virtual) display.
This idea has been tossed around for a while: the BOOM used it, it's a
staple in VR, and the UWashington group promotes it (I think).
I bring it up again because of the recent convergence of a few ideas, and
because I just had another idea (oh oh...).
1. Thad mentioned the observation that a HMD is intrinsically far more
power-efficient than a big CRT, for the fundamental reason that the
light-emitting surface is closer to the detector (the eye).
2. It's been brought up here again recently that a HMD can be used to
manually pan over a larger virtual display.
3. The Kopin (and Liquid Image) displays look like great technologies, but
they have too low resolution (at this time).
3. I've been playing with some Murata ENV-05s angular rate sensors
("gyroscopes") for another image-compositing application, and these seem
like they would be a decent sensor to provide the head-pointing data for
this app. Gyration has available now a newer rate sensor, the MG100, that
looks almost perfect for this (except it's a bit large). ($150, Quant 3,
$17 Quant 5K)
4. My idea:
Have two optically-superimposed Kopin 320x240 displays: a monochrome one
occupying a large FOV (40x30degrees) and a colour one occupying 10x7.5
degrees. The virtual image space could be 1280x960 or even bigger, and the
large mono image would be a "cue" or "overview" image.
In operation, it would appear to the user that the mono image is fixed in
space, and that a colour window follows your head around as you point it to
different areas on the mono image.
In actual implementation, the image data scrolls around the screen, driven
by the rate gyros. Though this could be done in software, It would be a
lot nicer if a blitter could help out. Two separate video cards might be
required, or two displays could be fed from one card (eg., the red+green
outputs drive the colour display and the blue output drives the background
mono display)
Anybody patented this yet?
From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH)
Maintained by R. Paul McCarty
Archive created with babymail