Mobile Eye-Trek from Olympus – augmented reality for the masses?
The concept of augmented reality, utilizing technology such as mobile displays and portable devices that can superimpose data onto your view of the real world, has been around for awhile in various forms, but now the technology really is starting to catch up to the vision with the development of tools like Olympus’ Mobile Eye-Trek. It’s basically a set of glasses with a tiny LCD panel in the right eyepiece, which simulates a viewpoint approximately 50cm in front of the user. GPS tracks the users location and wireless functionality allows the device to send and receive data from a server which is hosting the local data. A prototype of the mobile Eye-Trek and an associated data service will be undergoing testing in early March using students from Chuo University in Japan
Olympus has been making Eye-Trek head mounted displays for a few years now for the consumer market, so it is possible that a version of this device and the necessary data services may actually make it onto the market, with 2012 as a target date.
Via UberGizmo
2 Replies to “Mobile Eye-Trek from Olympus – augmented reality for the masses?”
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cool…I guess, but why so slow? why only one eye 😕
Surely the whole idea of AR is to make use of the steroscopic effect of having two images, one for each eye.
LCD tech isnt that expensive :-/
We should be able to make a dual-eye display now, not in 2012 with one eye.
Still, at least they are doing something.
I’m amazed bigger companys like Nokia, Nintendo or Sony arnt doing this.
A great point, but there are a lot of people I wouldn’t want to be around when distracted by a single projection, let alone double. It is a question of implementation I think. If you are dealing with a static position of view, then stereo is a great idea. If you are wearing the device constantly through the day though, with a constant feed, I think that a single is a more viable option.
Admittedly there is a lot of home grown, non-networked tech out there that supports the visual and location information. The real issue is syncing a highly accurate location with the roll/pitch/yaw as your head moves about, along with pulling networked data.
I will stop babbling now.