Tony Havelka wrote: > > The biggest problem still facing us all is the lack of a good, > > in-production head-mounted display suitable for constant use. > It is quite interesting that some people ... are "holding off" on > purchasing a commercial HMD because there isn't one available that > will do 800x600. (flame #t) I would be happy for now with a 640x480x1 bit display with awful contrast ratio if I didn't have to pay the power necessary to generate VGA and then resample it back down to LCD control signals. I would love to instead have a smart graphics terminal emulator running at the display itself, which would accept something like a 115kbps data stream with high-level graphics primitives (bitblt, outline/path stroke/fill, etc.; think of the BBN BitGraph, for example) but for the fact that none of the display vendors are interested in really revolutionizing the experimenter's HMD market segment by generating a thin display server. The Private Eye took the first step in this direction by putting the frame buffer on the display itself and using a simple protocol over a synchronous serial link to refresh portions of the display. This is ten year old technology, folks. The thing to do now is to put a tiny amount of intelligence on the microcontroller, allowing it to handle soft fonts and block transfers in that frame buffer, rather than carrying a high-bandwidth, easily corrupted analog signal from the power-hungry VGA adapter to the power-hungry scan converter, or worse, carrying several digital LCD control signals over several unmatched lines. To reiterate for the elegance-impaired, I need to be able to talk to my display using a high-level description rather than a high-bandwidth connection. The typical display engineer's ignorance of this concept borders on criminal negligence. The up-front IP issues for the wise display vendors will be 1) retargeting their FPGA-based scan-converter to be a simple graphics protocol interpreter and 2) developing drivers for Linux and Windows which interface to the virtual display. Then they will release the protocol for the graphics engine, sit back, and watch the orders roll in from all of us pimply-faced hackers still capable of recognizing an elegant solution. The unwise display vendors will spend their last shreds of VC condemning the market for not appreciating the completely ordinary features of their product. (flame #f) -Rehmi Post -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org
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