Zyberwear Wearable Mosaic Display

From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH) Maintained by R. Paul McCarty

Hi all,

      Hope this doesn't get on the mailing list twice.  I sent it yesterday 
and it hasn't shown up on the list, so I'm resending.

      I was looking around Zyberwear's website today and found a page 
(www.zyberwear.com/display_systems.htm) which talks about their Wearable 
Mosaic Display (WMD).  It has a short passage about the idea and if you 
click on the link it takes you to a basic specs/concepts page.
    From what I can gather it seems like a similar concept to the 
"body-oriented display" as discussed in the Woodrow & Caudell's 
"Fundamentals of Wearable Computers and Augumented Reality".

    Does anyone have any experience of this display system or know of some 
easy to get hold of software and tracker interface that can do it?

    From what I can figure, the wearable/remote computer references a 3-dof 
head tracker within a virtual sphere of screen space.  This virtual space 
could be a single huge window that the user is only ever looking at a small 
section of, or multiple windows where each one is the size of the physical 
HMD screen.  Then it's just a matter of matching the user's current head 
position to the right location or window within the virtual sphere.  You 
could always make a zoom function so the user can reset their relative 
position within the space if they get disoriented while navigating around a 
huge window.
    Once you have the head tracker, it doesn't sound like it would be very 
hard to program (though I'm not a programmer so I'm probably wrong).  I 
remember even from the early nineties you could get programs that made your 
computer's desktop bigger than the screen and you'd use scroll bars to move 
around it.  At that time it seemed pointless for a desktop system when you 
can use a layer/taskbar system more quickly.  However, the WMD would just be 
an evolution of that concept and made extremely intuitive and powerful with 
the use of tracking wearable displays.

    The only issue may be that it becomes tricky with a see-around monocular 
display - the user gets sick by seeing the real world as well as the virtual 
one spinning round everytime they want to change windows.  Maybe the user 
could lower the system to only a few window positions at the front and sides 
when interacting with the real world (imagine it, "excuse me Bob, just 
checking my email" - turns to face the other direction!).
    However, if you need to be focused on multiple computer tasks at the 
same time, it may become amazingly useful combined with a fully closed 
binocular display and have a completely immersive sphere of screen real 
estate.   You could even use the cheap video HMDs you can get on eBay for a 
hundred or so dollars, and have a pretty good display.

        Any info or thoughts?

                   Ben

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