| Author | Message | ||
     Spare Parts Rating: N/A |
I've been kicking around the idea of building my own HMD for a while but I'm finally going to give it a go now. I just wanted to run a few ideas past you folks to see what you think (any experience to add?) I read a post somewhere or other years ago where someone was joking about getting a 21" monitor and strapping it to your head - Haha! I thought; even if you mass-balanced it, it'd have horrendous inertia. Then, this week I had the opportunity to dismantle a (pre-broken) 15" TFT of the desktop variety. I stripped away anything that wasn't essential to the monitors ability to display an image; stand, front/back covers, mounting plates, speakers, ccfl knock cover, inverters and the 1st stage controller. I then put what I had left on the scales and it was down from nearly 4kg to just under 1kg. Its still too heavy for comfortable use on a classic HMD design but I'm aiming for a design which simply suspends the HMD over the wearer from a gantry. The HMD is then balanced front to back. The wearer would be seated when using the HMD and as such would have around 200deg of panning movement. This also allows for the associated cabling for signal and power to mounted on the gantry along with the inverter and one of the controllers. The display would initially (by virtue of one monitor) be non-stereo and have no optics - simply relying on the distance from eyes to display to get the best FOV / eyestrain trade-off. This, of course, gives 1024x768 resoltion. Most of the software i'll be using is no more than 2DOF so I'm looking at using a Gyro-Point mouse for head-tracking with mechanical guides to eliminate the roll>pitch problem. So in terms of money for the 'off the shelf' bits: 1x 15" TFT (ex-corporate recond) circa £100 1x GyroPoint Mouse circa £80 And then the cost of building the HMD and gantry which I estimate being between £50 and £100. That still looks a bargain to me. So what do you think - Am I barking up the right tree or are they still adding to much crack to the local water supply?  | ||
| Anonymous Rating: N/A |
Your creating a mobile monitor, which I guess is what an HMD really is. The only thing that comes to mind when I ready your idea is eye strain. | ||
| Anonymous Rating: N/A |
Excellent idea on using the Gyromouse as your tracker. Once people start to realize that headtracking doesnt have to be a complicated expensive piece of hardware the better off they'll be. Expensive deticated headtrackers do no better of a job at headtracking then a simple gyromouse does, for the purpose of gaming. One exception may be in flight simulators where roll is needed. Otherwise, dont waste your money. -Kevin |
