Another competitor leaving XYBR in the dust
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Olympus Sports Wearable Computing
(12/03/99, 12:55 p.m. ET) By Yoshiko Hara, EE Times
Olympus Optical Co. has demonstrated a monocular face-mounted display and a finger-set input device for wearablecomputing.
Olympus president Masahiro Kishimoto said the technology is one of five areas the company is focusing on. Speaking Wednesday at a corporate technology fair in Tokyo to commemorate the company's 80th anniversary, he identified the other technologies as opto-digital imaging, medical equipment, micromachining, and process-saving automated systems for factories.
The monocular head-mount display is based on technology already introduced in Japan in Eye-Trek, a lightweight sunglass-like head-mount display.
A device called the "free-shaped optical prism," combining a surface optical system and a special aspherical lens, was first used in head-mount products to achieve a compact form, Olympus said.
The optical system eliminates the bulky structure of concave mirror and half mirrors needed in conventional head-mount displays. Since it doesn't have half mirrors that absorb passing light, Eye-Trek is theoretically brighter than other displays.
For the prototype PC Eye-Trek, Olympus used a 0.47-inch reflective-field sequential LCD display with SVGA resolution supplied by Colorado Micro Display.
"We wanted to have SVGA resolution in this 'near-eye' application," an Olympus engineer said. "But such an application is rare and there were few LCDs that fit our needs. Only the field-sequential display was immediately available."
The display is connected to the portable PC through GVIF, which was proposed by Sony, the engineer said. Olympus researchers showed a TMDS connection with a PC by developing a GVIF/TMDS converter.
"For portable applications, the thinness of GVIF is significant," he said.
The viewer provides a virtual 10-inch SVGA color screen at about 20 inches ahead. Using the reflective LCD, the power consumption is kept to 1.6 watts, according to Olympus. The viewer weighs about 3.5 ounces.
The PC Eye-Trek was first demonstrated with IBM Japan's pocket-size computer prototype late last month. IBM Japan has been pursuing a "wearable" computer and the first prototype was shown in September 1998. At that time, IBM Japan demonstrated its own monochrome head-mount display.
The second prototype measures about 5.5-by-3.4-by-1.4 inches and weighs 13.4 ounces. It contains a Pentium MMX 233-MHz CPU, 64 megabytes of memory, and a 340-Mbyte Micro Drive, and is powered by Windows 95 or 98.
Olympus collaborated with IBM Japan so the display could connect directly to the PC. The prototype was close to a product, the company said, but Olympus wants first to test demand for the display with a market survey.
IBM's wearable PC has an expansion I/O box for input devices. But Olympus independently showed a prototype finger-set input device at its corporate show. Olympus engineers sought a detachable fingernail-like sensor device with controller, though voice recognition, a small keyboard, or glove-like sensors are considered the usual input devices for wearable computers.
"We don't want to use a glove because we want to give freedom to fingers for some other job," an Olympus engineer said. "The sensors can be made small and attached to nails. Connection between the controller and a PC can be wireless, but how to connect sensors and the controller is a challenge."
The angular velocity and acceleration of sensors on fingernails detect finger movement and send the data to the controller that is attached on the back of a hand. The controller then interprets them as commands. How to interpret each movement into a command is programmable.
In the demonstration, the index finger movement was assigned as slow cursor movement, an index and middle finger together were assigned as quick cursor movement. When a finger bends quickly, the movement is interpreted as a "click."
Combined with PC Eye-Trek, a user can select an icon by just moving and tapping a finger in the air. |
