look at me and my fancy hmd
after verifying that they both work i did what any rational person would do and immediately took them both apart.
i was surpised to find two kopin micro displays. i was expecting a larger single display with some prisms.
before i ordered i had no idea who the manufacturer of the hmd was. the instructions that came with it didn't even say. the only giveaway was some text on the circuit board. oriscape.
http://www.oriscape.com.cn/EN/e_GVD300.htm
hmm. it's a cyberman, who knew. anyway, the quality of the display is much higher than i expected. however, the fixed inter-occular-distance was not correct so it took some brain warping to make the images converge. lame! the resolution is too low to read text, but you can kinda operate windows if you already know where things are at.
the second package was the eyetoy and it worked right away with the hacked dlink drivers. pretty damn good for $14.50. here's a video. it's compressed with h264 at medium quality, but it is kinda representative.
www.z425.com/videos/turcs_small.avi (turing's in this one btw)
there are two things i especially like about this camera. it has better than average low light quality and it doesn't hard hang my machine if it is not properly shutdown unlike most piece of shit cameras (including the highish-end creative cameras). if you are in the market for a webcam, this is what you should get. the quality is just as good as a $80 usb2.0 cam.
here's the eyetoy taken apart. the case is 90% air. i wonder if the new silver one is the same cam with just less air.
after seeing that the hmd was also full of air i decided that i better take the parts out and slap them on my old sunglasses frames cuz that would be cooler. in the process i'd fix the inter-occular distance so it was perfect for me.
hey look. it's sam fisher.
amazingly i didn't even break it in the process. that's with even resoldiering some wires on the eyetoy because they were annoying me where they were. the best part of modding this together is now the images converge instantly! of course only for me.
www.z425.com/videos/meinaug.avi (video from my view. with augmented teapot of course.)
www.z425.com/videos/video_2006feb06_0003.ASF (video from outside view)
i can think of lots of fun-stupid projects for this. maybe the first one will be to mod doom3 with hmd support. once that is working it'd be cool to put a marker on the window and set one of the in-game doom3 windows (on mars) to look outside into my frontyard!! that'd be pretty awesome.