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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

I certainly don't want to bad mouth a guy who builds something cool, but there's a significant difference between this and Project Glass. He states in his blog post (http://www.willpowell.co.uk/blog/?p=210) The Vuzix glasses are driven by stereoscopic feeds, which are fed by the HD cameras.

What he's seeing is coming through the cameras. He's not looking at reality with an overlaid display. The glasses he is using are not see-through, they are displays. That's a very different experience from augmented reality and reduces your viewing to HD quality.

That also explains why at the beginning of the video we see him put on the glasses and there's no transition to seeing what he sees through them.

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This got me thinking about whether "fly-by-wire" vision will ever be viable (or preferable) to human vision and how various sight impairments would be dealt with using such a system. Certainly myopia would be a trivial fix since the image could be placed directly in front of the eye, but how would you correct for hyperopia without a convex lens between the eye and the display?

>"without a convex lens between the eye and the display"

I hardly see that as even a problem :)

prescription displays? Sounds like a big profit winner.

Now that's a great idea for us vision-impaired geeks; reason enough to own a pair

With a holographic combiner.

We already use Fly By Wire Vision in some cases, even with the engineering drawbacks of current devices: namely night vision for the military.

Contact lenses mandatory for users with impaired vision?

Consumer partially transparent head mounted displays are sort of available. SiliconMicroDisplay has one that is bulky and not really transparent enough to walk around in, but could be used to approximate Project Glass: http://www.siliconmicrodisplay.com/st1080.html

A useful wearable augmented reality experience would require a retinal scanning display, which is presumably what Google's prototypes use. Brother has been showing off a product like this, but it has been nothing more than expo fodder for the last few years: http://www.brother.com/en/news/2010/airscouter/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I0hF0cbw8E

Retinal scanning display. Hm… I wonder how good this really looks? I didn't find a review video by a independent party. So I remain doubtful as long as I don't experience it myself.

More importantly, it explains why both the world and the overlays appear in focus. I have yet to see an explanation for how Project Glass does the same. Apparently it's based on the same technology that went into Babak Parviz's contact lenses, which use Fresnel lenses to make the overlay appear in focus when your eye focuses on real-world objects several feet in front of you. Fresnel lenses also impair image quality. And you'd need another lens on the opposite side to undo the projection on light coming in from the world around you.

I'm wondering whether the reason that Google's glasses only use a small display in the corner of one eye is that the see-through image quality is simply not good enough to justify covering the wearer's entire field of view. If you look at the photos of Sergey Brin wearing them, they are not very transparent, at least from the angle the photos were taken: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/6/2929927/google-project-glas...

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