Designer Glasses With Microdisplay Unveiled 161
An anonymous reader writes to tell us about an Israeli company, Lumus-Optical, and their nicely designed eyeglasses featuring twin microdisplays and mini projectors. They will be demoed at CES in January. From the article: "The firm's latest prototype boasts dual 640 x 480 resolution displays as well as two wee projectors on each arm; the Lumus glasses can accept video inputs via an undisclosed connection, and projects an image akin to a '60-inch screen from 10 feet away.' Its Light-guide Optical Element technology allows the imagery to be reflected back on to the lenses so users can view them, all while being transparent enough to allow you to focus on the humans, trees, road block, or board room presentation ahead of you."
The goggles... (Score:5, Funny)
Nerd goggles (Score:5, Funny)
Can I get a date by wearing the goggles? Or can I get a girl to date me by her wearing them? Or can I date the girl in the picture? How do they work exactly??
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Covered Under Health Plan? (Score:2)
Finally, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally, (Score:5, Funny)
When you grow other, you'll be hassled by "the woman" when you watch porn...
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Obligatory Family Guy Quote (Score:2)
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Madagascar plays:
"What kind of music do you like, Gloria?"
"Hippo-Hop. Woo-hoo, yeeah baby!"
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Hahaha, DUDE, those animals are so FUCKING funny, they make me want to merge without looking!
*cars crash*
YEAH, RUMSFELD!
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Yes but I'm sure you (or the public) will be hassled by 'the other brother' if you're watching porn in the public.
My apology in advance if I'm replying to a female.
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Public transport is stress free? So what of:
1. Standing in the rain for an hour waiting to see if it turns up
2. Being thrown off because you don't have the right change
3. Sitting amongst unruly, foul-mouthed kids
4. Your shopping spilling all over the floor
5. Getting there late
6. Only being able to travel at certain hours
7. Having to walk several miles to and f
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1. Never had a bus not turn up
2. Never had a bus driver not break a note for me (although I've never tried to buy a $1.30 fair with a fifty)
3. Depends on the time, mornings and evenings, none. 3 in the afternoon it's still better than the unruly foul mouthed drivers that clog up the streets around where I live (I live near two schools)
4. Bags are awesome
5. I've only ever been late when it was my fault (ie, missing the bus)
7. Nearest bu
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Try after school closing time. Or after pub closing time...
Yeah now try keeping track of ten of them, full of stuff that breaks if you drop it.
So if the timing isn't right, you could be waiting for up to an hour waiting for the bus?
And I've still never seen a bus service that runs regularly 24/7. Cars can do that.
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6. There is no #6!
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1. Max 20 minutes between busses, and that on Sunday @ 23:30.
2. Prepaid tickets
3. We had some of these once, the dricer stopped and asked them to get out. And everybody else supported him.
4. As the previous poster said, bags. Also, almost each square has its own mini-market.
5. That is actually the fault of the bus?
6. True, we don't have service from 01:00 to 05:00.
7. Most sub-1000-people settlements have 2 to 3 bus stops...
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Move to a city. (Score:2)
There is culture.
There are buses.
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Tokyo or London?
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I've never been to Tokyo but I did have a blast in London and if the cost of living wasn't so freaking high I'd love to live there one day. But actually it's looking like my commute will be from Long Beach, CA to Los Angeles, CA via one train and one bus each way.
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mandelbr0t
Efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
Enlightenment is easy.
Easy answers (Score:2)
To sum up all the posts in this thread on public transit: When public transit works, it's great. When it doesn't work, it isn't.
I'll let you in to a secret (Score:2)
It is you who is being brainwashed. Enjoy your overly length commute to work while helping to spread the cold and flu to people.
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And oddly enough 20 times as many people use that public transportation so it pollutes less (not to mention that electricity apparently is less polluting to produce than gasoline is to burn even by coal power plants).
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BTW - that mileage could be going up to 2.5-2.6 when the new hybrid deisel-electric busses from DaimlerChrysler/Allison, so PT is getting closer to matching the insight/prius set.
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Furthermore, while the bus might only ha
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At 20 riders per efficient mile, 2 vs 40 is a wash. Consider that car miles are more efficient than busses (this is a guess - I'll say 30% more on average), and 20 riders average is a pipe dream. The busses in my town probably only seat 30-32 (okay, that's a guess, too - it's been a while since I've riden in one as I live close enough to work to walk). If you
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-Take bus to train station (or bike): 10 minutes
-Wait: 10-15 minutes
-Take train to light rail station: 10 minutes
-Wait: 10 minutes
-Take company shuttle to work: 15 minutes
If I'm less than lucky it's:
-Take bus to train station (o
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Invest in Insurance Stocks! (Score:2, Funny)
Insurance? Don't you mean Health Care? (Score:2)
On topic, the only thing I really want is industrial diamond glasses. No more soft plastic lenses or thick glass ones, just a few mm of diamond for any eye adjustment you could need. As an added bonus, you could use them to sharpen your knives.
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Diamonds are hard in terms of "they don't scratch" but are (relatively) brittle. I believe if you smash a diamond with a hammer it WILL shatter along its crystal faces. (I could be wrong on this)
For eyeglasses, while scratchproofing is nice, impact resistance is far more important. I don't want diamond lenses that will shatter into a bunch of tiny sharp pieces when a hockey player with no aim sends a puck into the opposing team's pepband and not the goal. (Yes, Harvard hockey play
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As far as I can tell, diamond has a similar toughness to strong plastics. References from wikipedia on fracture toughness [wikipedia.org] and diamond [wikipedia.org] aren't really clear, but seem to put diamond between metals and general plastics in terms of toughness, hence my assumption that they are probably about as strong as polycarbonate
heh (Score:2)
is that like the sensor bar?
allow you to focus on the humans, trees, road block
for those of you driving in motor vehicles equipped with media players and the proper output connections. and if so - why not a hud built into the wind shield?
i could see this as a cool thing but the whole lightness and cool factor drops a bunch when there's a cable running down your back and your tethered to whatever is feeding the projector.
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In order for a hud to be viewable on the windshield in daylight the windshield must be special, which translates into expensive. People lose windshields to rocks falling off of semis and the like every day. That is why this is a stupid idea.
Note that the HUD in a military aircraft does not display on the canopy. It displays on a transparent scr
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That wouldn't be pretty. (Score:2)
A cracked windshield is probably preferable to one that's translucent from being sandblasted with road grit. I suspect, though I don't know for sure, that the ones on race cars probably have a very short lifespan.
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They do, about one race. Also, they use tear strips on the F1's helmets rather than cleaning them, and boy does it suck when you run out of tear strips!
Fairly sure some of the Nascar guys use them on their windshields too.
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Right... I've been driving cars for ten years, and never once had to replace a windshield. I've been wearing glasses far longer and replace them, on average, every 1-2 years. That is why putting a display in my glasses is a stupid idea.
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It isn't really as bad as you make it out to be.
The "specialness" is really just a coating to prevent double-reflections (one from the front of the glass and one from the back of the glass). You can purchase a user-applicable version of this coating yourself. Various c
Augmented Reality (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Augmented Reality (Score:4, Funny)
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640x480 resolution is exactly enough to show a standard size and aspect ratio 480i/p TV picture; it'll be the equivalent of 480pX where X is whatever its refresh rate is, at 60Hz, it'll do DVD-quality playback (either at 480i60 or 480p24/30) and better (480p60).
Admittedly, its not enough to show HD content.
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Artificial eyes and a computerized brain would be more handy, though.
Re:Augmented Reality (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be really neat to have the small envelope icon pop up in a corner of your vision as another mean of informing you. Of course, this is not for everybody and I'm already anticipating the reaction of the I-don't-want-that-therefore-it-sucks crowd. It would also take some good design to make it so that it doesn't block your field of vision, I wouldn't want to be driving in the middle of a busy road and have a giant sms envelope popping right in front of my eyes. Yet, done well it would absolutely kick ass.
Since I'm day-dreaming, how about coupling that with those keyboards made of light ala Final Fantasy Movie that came out for the Palm. You could see the keyboard in your glasses and type in thin air a reply. And don't forget a cyberpunk favorite, the digital watch.
The future in the mirror is closer than it appears.
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Re:Augmented Reality (Score:5, Funny)
never have an awkward moment at a cocktail party every again!
How about "Look at the stupid glasses that guy's wearing!"
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You bring up a very good point. This technology has existed for a while. Unfortunately its developed by geeks, not fashion accessory designers. What I mean by that is if it is not as sexy as an iPod, or a Bluetooth earpiece etc. then it will not be picked up by the mainstream. And the mainstream is DYING for something like this if they can make it sleek, sexy, cheap and simple enough for the mass market.
If they made one of these suckers able to p
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I, for one, hope these things don't take off until I'm out of school or people will raise the bar for those of us who don't cheat.
And then there's always the ability to watch porn anywhere, but that's a whole other can of worms.
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Lets get some higher resolution in these things and start doing some augmented reality!
Why do you need a higher resolution for that? There was a time when computers worked with 320x200 resolution and people seemed to do well. How much info do you really need to be there? How well will you be able to focus on both the digital info and the reality in front of you? It's not because 1600x1200 is now the lower limit for graphics cards that _every_ application suddenly needs them.
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Needs faster wearable computers (Score:2)
Face recognition is okay, but to really do augmented reality well you need to first figure out the geometry of the whole scene. Hardware is just getting fast enough to do that in real time, but portable hardware that can do it is still a few years away. For example, OpenVIDIA [sourceforge.net] is fast enough to track 1000 features in real time, but requires a high-end SLI setup to do it (at least, if I remember the benchmark correctly -- I can't find it again).
Two wee projectors on each arm (Score:2)
Gadget Makers: get some fashion sense (Score:4, Insightful)
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How freakin' dorky do those "designer" glasses look? What's so hard here, integrate your displays into a normal looking pair of sunglasses and make them no more bulky while doing so. Yes, that means you are going to have to do something revolutionary and hide that revolutionary technology in something that looks normal. Cause that's what people want when they are out in public; to look like everyone else
1.3 billion people would disagree with you. That's a pretty large fraction of the Earth's population who wears glasses (ignoring contact-lens wearers). Once 1.3 billion people are doing something, it *becomes* normal, and frankly, it's not only stupid but downright idiotic that you would imply that all 1.3 billion want to "look like everyone else" or "look normal".
No to mention that you'd look pretty stupid wearing sunglasses indoors or when it's dark outside. But then, I'm guessing you do that alre
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I'm Elwood Blues, you insensitive clod!
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OP had it right - quit making these things so homely that you wouldn't wear them where anyone could actually see you. If they have to tint the glasses to hide the electronics, so be it - for now. They can work on the transparency as you get better, but there will be be no money to keep them going if the only sales are to demo companies and the odd ric
why bother with a virtual 60" screen 10' away (Score:2, Funny)
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Nice design, but is it functional? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a really nice design, but how does it function? Their website (www.lumus-optical.com) doesn't specify beyond potential application. Does it allow you to clip onto existing glasses, or do you have to use their display as well? It has a clean display in comparison to the My Vu specs (www.myvu.com), but there doesn't seem to be a lot more to it. Does it have built in audio, does it have a bulky adapter/controller? I for one would like to see more information on the website.
Assuming these question
Undisclosed? (Score:5, Funny)
Undisclosed? What, does the input jack require lube or something?
"...So you see, the electrical impulses are carried along the central nervous system then back out through the epidural layer near the magnet on the glasses... "
"Look, I don't care how it works that is Not an entrance!"
[badum-ching]
multipupiloptomy (Score:2)
Of course, that input requires a special implantation surgery... From Hot Shots:
"It's called a multipupiloptomy, but in order to keep from damaging
Home page, earlier products (Score:4, Informative)
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Drivers of anything that has a blind spot at the rear, to watch the backup camera.
Drivers at night, to watch the car's infrared camera without defocusing from the road.
Parents: watch the nannycam in real time.
Anybody with a swimming pool at home.
Police: the police dog already has a harness, sometimes with a light so you can keep track of the dog as it follows a trail. Add an image-stabilized cam
if only (Score:2)
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Crappy marketing (Score:2)
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Better than not seeing individual pixels -- with resolution that small, you need every one you can get! (Seriously, I've used something like this (a MicroOptical SV-3, to be specific) before -- if anything, I wish the pixels were bigger.)
60" VGA = 13dpi (Score:2)
How about we shoot for effectively 17" XGA
Dangers of extended use? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Dangers of extended use? (Score:5, Informative)
You're not. The focal distance is much further away than that -- the apparent focal plane floats in front of the user at a comfortable distance. Thus, eye strain should be reduced compared to normal computer use.
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As if the bluetooth earphone wasn't dorky enough.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow, arm mounted projectors (Score:2)
Wii projectors or wee projectors? Wii projectors, body movements, and arm mounted Wii projectors and things could get dangerous. We just need portable power for the Wii and projectors.
Wii Controller (Score:4, Funny)
Phase-array optics (Score:2)
Solid Vision (Score:2)
What I really want to see is tiny cameras on the fronts of the projectors, registering the 3D scene so the projected display can be mapped closely onto it.
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Thad Starner, formerly of MIT and now at Georgia Tech has been using a wearable computer with a display built into his glasses for YEARS. This is NOT a new idea. It wasn't a new idea a month ago when slashdot posted an article from another company doing the same thing, and it won't be a new idea a month from now when they post an article about ANOTHER company developing the same thing. Problem is, none of these things ever actually comes to market, so you get a bunch of people reinventing the wheel and no one actually mass producing it.
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They're posting the topic once for each eye.
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