Tag: Head-mounted Display

When you’re on the go and you want to watch videos, most of us do it on the small screen of our smartphones or at best a tablet. What if you could watch your favorite content on a massive screen no matter where you are?

Head-mounted displays (HMD) have been around for years, though they tend to be prohibitively expensive. Caputer Labs is touting its Seer as an augmented reality display, though it could end up simply being a cheap HMD instead.

Ad-blocking software is a double-edged sword, but overall I still think it needs to exist. But as Sean Tejaratchi so effectively explained, the barrage of ads online is nothing compared to what’s happening in the real world.

Mobile phone 3D or virtual reality headsets are one of the newest tech accessories. Like Google’s Cardboard, the Viewbox is on the cheap and low-tech side. But instead of paper it’s made of neoprene, a synthetic rubber used in many products, from wetsuits to laptop sleeves.

While the world awaits for the prophesied Oculus Rift to rise, we’re seeing more and more virtual reality headsets that use smartphones as their brain. However, most of these peripherals are content to provide you a case and a pair of lenses.

At the 2014 Google I/O Conference, Google unveiled Cardboard, an inexpensive Android-based system for viewing and developing virtual reality and 3D content. As its name implies, it uses a cardboard base, along with other inexpensive items.

We’ve seen Google Glass used to help blind people. Researchers at Brigham Young University (BYU) on the other hand are using Glass as well as other head-mounted displays to help deaf students learn. They call their project Signglasses.

Jerry’s Place is a project about nothing from programmer Greg Miller for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. And it is unlike any other. This one recreates Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment from Seinfeld with 3D models created in Blender for the Unity game engine.

Last November we heard about VRcade, a virtual reality system that lets the user move around while wearing a VR headset, thanks to wireless wearable electronics and cameras. A company called Zero Latency is working on the Inversion Project, a very similar setup for VR poster child Oculus Rift.

We first heard about Avegant’s Glyph retinal display a few months ago, which uses tiny mirrors and optics to reflect images directly to the user’s eyes instead of using conventional displays. Now in beta, the Glyph has a new trick: a headphone mode.

A new company called VRcade aims to revive the idea of a gaming arcade with the help of virtual reality. Whereas VR headsets like the Oculus Rift need to be wired to a computer to work, VRcade’s headset has a wireless transmitter.

With gadgets like the Oculus Rift and Google Glass, it’s looking like the future of displays is going to be a war for space on our faces. Here’s one more promising invention that may make you wish you had several pairs of eyes and foreheads.

Here’s another device that could be vying for space on your face in the near future. A company called Avegant is making what they call a Virtual Retinal Display. The thing is, it doesn’t actually have displays.

New videogame systems all have one weakness: there are barely any games that come out at the same time as the hardware. The PS Vita and the Wii U are the most recent victims of this dilemma.

A few months ago we found out about the Durovis Dive, a virtual reality gaming headset for Android smartphones. A similar device called vrAse is now looking for funding on Kickstarter. The company behind it claims that future versions will be compatible with all smartphones.

I’ve had the opportunity to try out a number of head-mounted displays over the years, and most of them have been pretty underwhelming, either from a display quality or comfort perspective. And while many users are waiting to see what the consumer version of the Oculus Rift has to offer, there is already a very capable head-mounted display – with a head-tracking option – on the market today.