Confortable video glasses? Lumivision makes a step further

I will explain my question. Reading every day and standing too much in front of the computer or focusing all the time near objects or actions is something our eyes are not supposed to do all the time and are not well-enough adapted for that.

Our eyes are relaxing, the muscles that make them squeeze are also in a relaxation-state when we watch things that are 6m or more away from us. If there was a technology of video glasses that could do that the productivity of everyone would increase by a high margin. We won’t feel so tired in the eyes and could document more, work more and so on.

I know of various research of projecting driving parameters on the car’s windscreen as if it was 10 or more meters in front of the car so that the driver doesn’t have to always switch between the far vision and near vision to see the speed or any other control on the car’s driving panel. But unfortunately nothing actual. Especially none of that for video glasses.

To get the illusion to the eye that it sees a giant screen 30m in front of it the video glasses should have a behavior as seen in the sketch below:

One important thing about these video glasses is that they would use a lateral projector and a lenses/prisms/mirrors gear to direct the light through the actual glasses lens so this doesn’t make the glasses look like sci-fi alienware and doesn’t make you look like a Star-treck character.

The technology exists as this image from Lumusvision shows:

 

The LOE, Lumus’ patented, revolutionary Light-guide Optical Element (LOE) comprises a flat, transparent optical substrate that incorporates a set of embedded partially reflecting facets. The upper figure illustrates the LOE function. An optical image, generated by a microdisplay (e.g. LCD, LCoS or OLED), is coupled into the LOE substrate. Trapped by total internal reflection, the image components are guided along the LOE. The image is then expanded and coupled out by a set of partial reflectors for viewing by the user. The LOE provides the viewing experience of a large distant screen: an enlarged, distant image, with a large field-of-view (FoV).

Here it is an image that shows how “normal” these video glasses can look like:

The field of view is speced at 27.5-degrees, which the company claims is the equivalent
of watching a 58-inch TV at 10 feet. The weight of the headset is less than 50 grams – light compared to most devices, and the input signal is NTSC or PAL composite video.

The equivalent view of the video glasses above is resembling with the situation in the image below:

I would expect that this will turn into an internet browsing device not only a portable cinema and as long as it doesn’t extend the size of the equivalent screen to at least double the actual performance (6 meters equals to about 20 feet) it will still be hard on the eyes at long exposure. For me I would like to browse the internet or read documents at a wall-size equivalent screen watched from 10 meters away. (Anyone should know of anything similar write a comment, I want that video glasses right away)

This should not be hard to accomplish: take a subject, put a big screen 30 feet away in front of him, calculate how should look the image he sees at a glasses distance in front of his eyes, make an algorithm and apply that on a video input signal and there you are, you fulled his eyes into believing that he sees a screen 150″ or more at a 30 feet in front of him. How does that sound. It sounds pretty easy for me. Here you are even a sketch:

Next step will be offering an image for the left eye and an slightly different image for the right eye so that the action mimics the 3d perception of space the human brain uses. It’s just that I don’t know of the effects of it on the eyes. Do they get tired quickly? Perhaps not if the distance simulated keeps 6+ meters and the left image and the right one fit the same images that the eye would receive if the subject was at the respective distance. All the other things should be simulated with different amounts of blurring (3d modelers name it DOF- depth of field).