Close

The rise of head mounted displays

A project log for Home made laptop

Can a home made laptop finally cost less than a commercial one?

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 01/16/2023 at 20:100 Comments

A wave of 1080p head mounted displays came out of nowhere in the last year.  The breakthrough was Sony finally achieving a 1080p OLED panel in a very small form factor.  Before then, they were all 640x480, the display was too bulky to mount in front, so they were limited to filling a corner of 1 eye with a reflector.  The new head mounted displays are much more compact than the giant VR goggles of decades past.  

https://www.amazon.com/TCL-NXTWEAR-Glasses-Portable-Wearable/dp/B0BCXF1MJL

https://www.amazon.com/Nreal-Micro-OLED-Augmented-iOS-Consoles-Compatible/dp/B0BF5LKP5Q

https://www.amazon.com/Rokid-Glasses-Friendly-Pocket-Sized-Massive/dp/B09P4VJ895

The NReal Airs seem to be the most compact, with a $200 addon required for diopter adjustment.  They all have removable shades of some form for totally blacking out the background.

For what lions use a laptop for, a head mounted display negates any need for the giant hunk of glass we've been carrying around for 30 years.  The big question is if enough animals are going to adapt to head mounted displays for them to be mass produced or if the traditional custom of what a laptop should be is going to send head mounted displays the way of drive-in theaters.

The things reviewers complain about are contrast, lack of orientation sensing, & compatibility but these are all fixable in software.  You can program black & white user interfaces & translate the HDMI standard into the displayport standard.  Some of them find a stationary screen with a moving background to be disorienting or they want a bigger desktop by moving their head.  The biggest challenge would be drawing a fixed screen orientation in a moving vehicle.  That would require an IMU on the glasses & an IMU on the vehicle, both IMUs tracking magnetic north.  That would determine your head's orientation relative to the vehicle.

The 1 place where a head mounted display wouldn't work is when using it outside, not wanting your eyes to be shaded.

Discussions