Steve, Until recently there was very little choice in HMD availability. For a long time the standard was mono QVGA M1 displays. The price has always been decent but the borg factor not too good (eyepeice is quite large and obtrusive), and the driver electronics are also quite large. Aside from that some people have used Glasstron and Cy-Visor, both of which are not really monocular, so some have done hacks, but they are not a very viable solution. There have been announcements that fizzled like the Inviso eGlasses and others. I don't think its very easy to be a manufacturer of HMDs because volumes are low. But recently prices have dropped quite a bit on MicroOptical, and the new SV-3 is quite a bit better than prior models IMO. In particular the driver electronics are small and power consumption is quite low. In my opinion its a great deal even if/when the price goes up a bit. I am impressed with the display quality although they are still a bit fragile, the cables can cause trouble, one needs to be careful with these units. I am hoping that MicroOptical does some better cabling on their displays. I think the answer to your question is both reasons and more. There are many reasons that people would want a display that is not near to eye. Try wearing one for 8 hours and you'll see what I mean. There are many functions that might be occasional, for example to check the time or look up a phone number etc etc. It is natural to look on your wrist rather than put on a HMD just to do something simple. I have always been quite interested in alternative displays. Initially it was because of the reasons you noted, but after trying many things I have concluded that there is good reason for both. A menu displays on a 4x20 text display with a few buttons goes a long way, and I plan to expand on what I have done with that in the past. I'm also interested in speech dialogues that would do similar ... BTW some people like the borg factor ... there was one guy I spoke to who wanted the hardware on the outside of his clothing so it looks as borgish as possible. hee hee. -- Doug Steve wrote: > I see a lot of alternate displays discussed on the list. > Is this because of the price of HMDs, > or the Borg factor of HMDs, or ? -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/expander/false domain
From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH)
Maintained by R. Paul McCarty
Archive created with babymail