Personal Display

In summer 2001 I bought two Cy-Visor displays through eBay á USD 700. For one of them I went bicycling around Lake Taho in the early September after a conference to fetch (more fun than getting them by express).
(the white box on the rack is the Cy-Visor)

The intention was to hack them both into a 3D display, and I didn't really want to walk around like this: .
As I have also been working with the PhD and the company, moved and such, I finally didn't have much time then. Finally, in January this year (2004) I started however, but it was not easy. Now I've finally solved the problem.

This is the Cy-Visor original design (pdf), also available as Dia drawing

The soldering, to remove the big inflexible connector, was quite tedious because the wires were quite thin. Here is a closeup of the soldering and the cy-visor display motherboard after soldering.

The problem, however, was that the display was still very big and clumsy and the lens was far under the desired requirements to get a crisp picture of an 8x10mm 800x600 pixel display. After searching it seems that it is hard to find lenses with the right properties without actually going into costly special designs.

Some time ago I found a solution. Instead of trying to find a perfect lens combination, why not utilize the properties of the eye better. The solution is to use a contact lens as the main lens. I got a pair of cool sunglasses which have space for the whole kit when using a contact lens. As the lens is now moving around with the gaze on the screen this solution does not have the same aberration problem which the Cy-Visor lens originally had. As the lens is quite strong, 50 diopters, plus your personal correction (mine is -2), which in my case results in -48 diopters, it is also quite thick, about 1 mm. These strong lenses are, however, produced with a certain technique called lenticulation, otherwise they would become much thicker.

This is the Cy-Visor hacked design (pdf), also available as Dia drawing I will soon show you more details and report about my experince with the display and the contact lens.

Another idea, still somewhat futuristic idea, when having this kind of glasses is to have the inside of the glasses covered with micro mirrors similar to those used by Texas in their display chips. If you then have contact lenses which are adapted to the distance of the display you will get a tremendous resolution by using a couple of Red-Green-Blue lasers which provide a seqential color light. If you have a powerful enough computer you can also skip the contact lenses and create a hologram which is adapted to your eyes, like this (Dia drawing here).