moar on the Vuzix 920AVs

Some happily specific details shamelessly scrobbled from some guy who had dinner with the Vuzix and MetaIO folks at GDC09. He said some other things, something about fMRI-driven missile launch systems, I dunno.


* They don’t know exactly what the price will be, but they are expecting it to be less than $500.
* Paul is very confident that the Wrap glasses will ship this year
* The displays are 800×600 in these glasses. That’s a step up from the 640×480 resolution that their other glasses use.
* The two displays are independantly controllable through a variety of methods, but if your software can handle it, you can provide 60Hz to each eye.
* The IMU for the wrap will include accelerometers, gyros, and magnetic sensors, and will provide yaw, pitch, and roll to the software at a very high rate.
* When they are in visual pass-through mode the Wraps will blend a translucent scene over the world. In this mode the brighter a pixel is the more visible it will be to the user. That makes black the transparent color and white the “visible as it gets” color.
* Paul was coy about exactly what the specs on the camera will be. I think they aren’t 100% settled yet. He was very aware of the issues with frame rate on USB cameras, though, so hopefully they will figure out a way to provide a reasonable frame rate (or at least crisp frames.)

So.. it sounds like they're getting better and more expensive all the time, which is ok with me. I guess they want to dominate the market for a while - my advice is to hurry and get that first-mover coolness established. Perhaps they can be the Apple of AR


Today I scared librarians by talking about RFID tags and security; waxed lyrical about AR goggles and made people jealous of my EeePC. It has been a good day.
Now it is a good day with beer in it. \m/
And I was lying about the missiles.