[Wear-Hard] On head mounted displays

[Tony Havelka]

Comments:
> The HeadPlay DOES carry a very decent 1024x768 XGA display. Xrandr 
> doesn't show modes for 1280x720 HD720p widescreen, so I haven't been 
> able to try it yet.
"carry" is an interesting word.  With 800x600 LCoS panels, it is pretty 
much a waste of processing power to send it anything more than that as 
the Liberator (cough, cough) has to down scale it back to 800x600 to 
display it.
> Complaints I've read about the headplay vary from the lame - 'this 
> isn't a movie theater on my head', to the mundane but interesting - 
> 'when I look to the sides I see dark spots?'.  There is a kind of mild 
> fish-eye distortion in the middle of your field of vision that could 
> get disorienting after a while, but more importantly the corners are 
> usually unreadable - and only readable with some eye strain. Edges are 
> not much kinder to the eye muscles.
That's the problem with a HMD that is targeted towards the consumer 
market.  Everything is subjective.  It's hard to get constructive 
feedback for further improvement development.
>
> Darting your eyes too fast also shows an afterimage of each pixel's 
> color as it refreshes. I'm not sure why it seems to refresh one color 
> after another, if my refresh rate is really 1/3 of what they say.
You get this color breakup from any field sequential display.  Even 
though the LCoS might be refreshing at 120hz, the part of your eye that 
is sensitive to changes in contrast can easily pick that up.
> But none of these things are problems if you are watching the center 
> of the screen. In fact, it might be better to focus your vision 
> forward, and use some means of moving data in front of your 
> accessible. Not just a headtracker to move your head around in a 
> fanciful 3d simulation world, but a headtracker to pan around a 
> desktop, or another method of bringing data to the front of vision. I 
> shouldn't have to reach my eyes to the corners of the screen to see 
> something. This will have to be part of my interface.
But that's not how we naturally view the environment.  We move our eyes 
first - they are the fastest things to move and they don't weigh much.  
If there is something interesting, we engage our neck muscles to move 
our much heavier head - bringing the scene into our Fovea for further, 
fine detail, processing.  Keeping everything in our fovea all of the 
time is not the way we view things naturally.