Wearable Displays?

tolan's my name asks: "I am currently looking at designing and building my own wearable. I'm looking at using some sort of ARM processor, some basic voice command recognition, and so on. The real bugbear at the moment is the display. What I'm really looking for is a single eye HUD, so as I can actually wear the thing and function normally (as normally as one can while looking like a Borg). I was wondering if anybody on /. knew of sources for this sort of display and if anyone had any experience of using them. More generally any experiences or links concerning wearables in general would be appreciated, though not ones using the PC/104 hardware platform."

Wearable Howto

[b1ng0]

Check out http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Wearable-HOWTO.html. It explains the necessary components for building a wearable computer and also describes the different screens that can be used.

to answer your question

[cfish]

there are plenty of web sites to search for, so i don't know why you asked.

I worked on this briefly last summer. the most interesting of all are all not out in the market. The retina scan is very good. it has only one color (red, with grey scale) but very sharp. it's the only display that can let you actually look at the background while performing other tasks. unfrotunately it is way expensive (15k).

Most others are based on little LCDs. the latest xybernaut ( here's me wearing a older version [purdue.edu] ) uses basically a small LCD and a semi- reflective lens.

Wearable Computers

[Barcode]

Well, I've been using a wearable for a while now, and have used four such displays... First let me start off by saying that for in depth information on the wearable computers the mailling list, [e-mail] is a great resource...

As for displays, one could buy one for ~3500 dollars us, such as the microopticalcorp.com's 1/4 vga display embedded in the glasses. That's for big spenders...

Next, you could buy a premade monocle such as the i-glasses that are sometimes advertised on top of slashdot. These are ~300 dollars and are decent quality...

After that, you could go to what I have - a hacked monocle sony glasstron a35 in a pair of large sunglasses. These are ~640 by 480 at a fuzzy quality. This cost me 350 bucks...

After that, you could salvage a camcorder view finder that accepts ntsc from a scan convertor. This could cost as little as 50 bucks with any resolution from 1/4 vga up to vga depending on quality...

Re:High cost n wonderful? or cheap n cheerful?

[tolan's my name]

Thank You

High cost n wonderful? or cheap n cheerful?

[quick_dry_3]

I'f you can afford it, the M2 from tekgear.ca [tekgear.ca] it looks great - though VERY expensive US$3.5k . Full VGA, maybe SVGA and with a look-through/translucent option.

If you can't stretch to the M2 then the least obtrusive of any display is from MicroOptical Corp [microopticalcorp.com] who make either tiny clip-on's which do QVGA (compress a 640x480 down to 320x240) and are VERY small, the other model is the integrated eyeglass - it looks just like prescription glasses. These are available now.

The inviso eShades that have had stories run on here are likely to hit market at around US$1000, the advertise in their press releases that it will be about 400-500, but after recent inquiries the price keeps rising, last I heard it was upto 800+. Don't hold your breath.

For displays NOW, unless you can build your own driver electronics - FPGA use is what people are looking at for n=building the driver logic from.

I'd go with an M1, fairly cheap (As far as HMD's go) and well tested and known amongst the borg community. They can be hacked to fir into sunglasses with a lil bit of effort. For colour, most people go the hacked glasstron route.

see wearables.los-gatos.net [los-gatos.net] for a comprehensive listing of most things wearable.

for arm based architecture I'd imagine you'd checked out the LART pages, but there is also an ARM based effor at MIT, its called mithril I believe, and the PLEB [unsw.edu.au] effort in Australia.

Hope that helps