@@IM2awsme I've not checked, but the common colours are blue and white. If there's a white you could put coloured film over it to have your choice of colour.
So, you're telling me I can put two of these in front of both eyes and see right through them and walk around all day at comicon with my cyborg suit looking totally legit? This is a total WIN!
You need double Fresnel lenses. One to refocus the OLED and a second to undo the first lens behind the OLED. You will have a pixelated real world but you should be able to have them both in focus.
It does work. Create wearable display. Wearable display is not visible to wearer. Create many wearable and wireless displays. Force everyone around you to wear them. Voila, physics bypassed.
I was getting hopeful there when he started talking about a lens being used... after an allergy induced microstroke about 8 years ago, my rx on my left eye is about 4 points off of my right eye. but I am so right eye dominant I generally do not notice. still the difference means I would have to get custom glasses made if I ever wanted to use HUD or VR... I was starting to get hopeful when he started about using a lens in conjunction with the display. I would absolutely talk to my eye doc about a set of glasses where the left eye had a very close focal point if the project could work.
@@marcusborderlands6177 he needs glasses that are essentially non prescrip on one eye, and the other eye needs to be prescrip. so one curved lens one flat lens, 99% of frames are not going to allow for that i.e. custom
So you want to add a SECOND lens in front of the display to pre-un-distort the real world? Won't work either. The field of view and focal point of each eye will be different, so it'll feel like you're cross-eyed. While you're here, watch Sean's video! th-cam.com/video/sVv1oc14X1w/w-d-xo.html
What if you are already cross-eyed? Still not worth limiting your field of view, and the added bulk of 2 lens. The entire point was a less bulky display, and this shows that's not possible.
I mean, it didn't fail - he got the expected result. But yeah, I love videos of people's projects not working, and discussions of why. Life isn't a highlight reel, things don't always work out.
I can look myself in the eye on a bright day... I can clearly focus on the reflection of my eyes in my glasses. Maybe Zack should change his eyeball out for a screen, and use a curved reflector to be able to focus the image back at the screen, which is also a sensor. Easy.
Haha, yep, I'm pretty much the same way. Downside is it's like having a lens between the display and the eye for a normal person, the real world is a total blur.
@@CollinBaillie Hey, optician here :D Given that the inside of your glasses act as a mirror, the actual distance your eyes have to focus on gets doubled. This makes a huuuge difference close to your eye because the needed refractive power gets exponentially increased the closer you get. You can calculate this: Refraction needed= 1/Distance in metres. Glasses should have a distance of about 15mm to your eyes requiring 66,67 dpt of refraction to see the lens itself. When looking into your reflection you only need 33,33 dpt. Exactly like he said, its physically impossible to make that screen work with our current understanding of optics.
Noob question: 3d cinemas work with polarization glasses, where each side filters a differently aligned photons. Could similar tech be used to "prealign" the photons instead of a lens so that only orthogonal photons are sent out in the first place?
Unfortunately, no. Polarising filters only block photons with the incorrect orientation, they don't actually align anything. You'd still need a secondary optical system which makes the screen image appear to be at infinity. The ONLY solution is the mirrored secondary optical system which makes the screen appear to be far away. Until someone markets that system cheaply and competently, these glasses are unobtainium.
you can design it like a computer, split them using such lenses/mirrors. next use a some mirrors and prisms, or magnetic fields to rotate the before sending them back to the filter.
@@akaChurch because they still have an optical system... which makes them appear to be far away. It's exactly the same principle just that it doesn't have to be mirrored against an IRL background. Think about it... unless you are exceptionally short sighted (and I actually was) then no human can focus something only "a few inches" from the eye. There has to be an optical system in there somewhere. Usually, it's closer to the eye than the thing you want the eye to focus on. We do the same thing with an SLR camera. The ground glass is only a few inches away (but reflected twice in the pentaprism) but the lens in the eye piece allows us to perceive it as being at infinity. Modern cameras with digital viewfinder screens? Same thing.
I HATE that I discovered Zack's channel a few months ago. I wish I discovered it much later. That way I could binge watch gazillions of hours of backlog.... All I can do right now is to watch them more than once. Already started this.
For future reference: (Present) I _yeet_ (Past/Imperfect) I _was yeeting_ (Past/Perfect) I _yote_ (Pluperfect) I _have yought_ (Future) I _will yeet_ (Future Perfect) I _will have yought_
i am extremely myopic so i can bring the display almost up to my eye and still be able to focus on the disk my nose can literally be touching the screen so no i wouldn't say no one. i would say most people. That being said i can't see far away anyway without corrective lenses so it doesn't really make much a difference the real world is blurry either way
Make a corrective lens that goes behind the display. There. Problem solved. You look through a display at the real world - the real world is corrected. You look at the display - the display is not corrected.
@@jetison333 There's another technology we already have that produces light in nearly-perfect parallel rays. Usually we're told _not_ to point those at our eyes, though.
If the issue is overlapping "rays" and the emitter sits right at our lense, in other words: There is no space for the rays to overlap, shouldn't that work?
this type of screen would be amazing on a diy vain finder! you would be making a lot of lab tech's, dr and nurses super happy if you could design a portable, light,reliable diy vain finder with this screen
Zack: Thanks for the clear explanation. I'm using it for my Georgia Tech class. One you thing you might cover is the light efficiency of these different optics. One of the reasons it is so hard to get a useful "see through" head worn display for outdoors is the loss of light from the beam splitters. In your example with Glass, the beam splitter is 50% reflective, and the image goes through it twice, meaning that 75% of the light is lost from that process (and then there is the efficiency of the LCOS display). All the "transparent" displays have this problem - some much worse than others. The other problem, as you know from the Moverio you wear, is that the beam splitter looks like a grey rectangle in front of your eye all the time, which is annoying. You can make it less gray by making it more transparent, but then the efficiency is even worse! Grumble. We really need a VERY bright microdisplay. Do you know of any very bright hackable modules? I'm looking for one to put into a scuba mask for our dolphin research.
This was a really, really great video. I love how you have not only upgraded your production quality, but you’ve also become more innovative and seamless in your creative decisions. The illustrations were great (and a perfect device for this explanation), but when I noticed that the old timey voice behind the eyeball stock footage was you… that is some amazing attention to detail. I’m glad you switched to being a TH-camr. You are very good at it.
Hey Zach, what if you used a frenell lense to parallelize the light from the display. To fix the room light issue, use a defocusing frenell lense to create a parallel light from the room, but having the display overlayed?
"put a lens between the eye and the display... makes the world impossible to see" okay, but like... mechanism to move the lens in and out of position? to switch from the world to the HUD like a fckin video game pause menu? ... actually that sounds fuckin dope, lemme get in on that-
"The know it all's among you think you already have the answer" me, not a know-it all nor particularly bright ahhh colaminated light "Lenses" Nooooooooooooo By the way. Thin film colaminators are a thing and ruin the "put the phone two inches from your eyes demo"
You should see the stack of glass on a HUD to remove all color lengths from the projected image and display only green, but still allow you to “see through” it without loosing any color lengths from the real world view in front.
Actually, TH-cam demonetizes you if you swear within the first minute. It also counts censor-beeps as swearing. And it will automatically censor automatic captions.
WDYM!!!?? at 16:04, you just explained how tech like the google glass and your device ARE transparent wearables!! Other than that complete twist, good vid! Really good explanations! Gives me hope that one day there'd be a perfect lense for VR, where there is ZERO distortion, ZERO glare + god rays, MAX fov
Hey Zack, awesome video! It was great watching it come together on the stream, and you explained it all really well here. Btw, where are you getting those micro displays you were talking about, id love to get my hands on some.
Hi @cyno0_ , Were you able to find the display? I would like to get it as well. Couldn't find it anywhere. Would be great if you still have the link and could share it. Thanks.
16:19 I know it's a dumb idea, but I'd love to take a crack at this where you pancake the display between two lenses, one lens front side to fix the display and another on the flip side to fix the pass through, but I do also feel like that'd probably end up more like techno goggle displays.
I hope someone (not me, too much work, unless?) just out of spite invents an OLED-type display that can emit collimated LASER light just because. (Might be good for maskless photolithography if it can be done)
The past tense of "yeet" will forever be "yote" for me. Also, really appreciate the entertaining way to explain and then visualize the basics of optical physics, if that was my first introduction to the topic (and not a dry textbook chapter) I would've understood it much more quickly.
If you wanted to make it work a bit better you could have a converging lens between the display and the eye (as shown), and an additional diverging lens after the display to cancel out the vergence. You would have a different field of view between the eye with the system and without, but the screen and the background could both be in focus
Sooo....if we take the design from 13:38 and add a second lense *after* the display, can we see the display and the "real" world? Like a lense that is convex between eye and display and a concave lense after the display?
That is my thinking as well Distort the real world light to match the density and general direction of the display then again distort but this time the combined light of the display and real world back to a parallel display
There is one solution in my mind to solve this. Buy a larger display, (13:24 ) that can should cover 80% or more of the field of view of one eye. Use a camera to film what is in the front of the eye ( everything that is blurred). Show data on display on top of the live video feed of "reality" on front of you. When you don't what to see any data on display you just turn it off and you will see reality as it is instead of a live feed of a camera. That's the magic of a thin transparent display. Please do that. Huge fan here!
What about a collumating layer, that just filters out light that isn't going straight. The light from the world is already straight so it wouldn't interfere with that
I just had a huge revelation thanks to you! I always wondered why when i dont have my glasses, i can make a tiny hole with my finger, look through it and things are clear... you made me understand what's going on there, thanks!
The video did kind of start abruptly.. no intro or anything. Must have been gaming the TH-cam filtering algorithm or something... I get some sort of nagging sub-conscious thoughts about Zack swearing at TH-cam.. something weird.
Quick question, @Zack Freedman, would a truly transparent OLED display be possible if one put a lens on the inner part of the display to focus the display itself... and a lens on the outer part to bring the rest of the world into focus?
What if you have a lens behind the display that makes the light traveling though un-parallel so the lens in front will make that light parallel again, so you get both.
I guess you could if you wanted to do this at home - but the point is that at that point might you not be better off just using one of the other kinds of displays?
I had the same thought. It should work, but you need sufficiently strong lenses. Also your lenses should be flat on one side each so they can touch each other (with the display in between). This is necessary that objects from outside aren't bigger, this would give you a headache probably. I don't know how cheap or expensive this would be, but maybe you can still save money if the other optics are this expensive.
That's the thing though - lenses are expensive. Especially quality ones custom to an application. Just ask anyone with a photography, or astronomy hobby, or anyone trying to buy prescription lenses without insurance. To your point - What you're describing is in all likelyhood theoretically possible - but that doesn't make it a good idea and you're adding so much extra custom optics, that you might as well go with the existing tech.
@@robjenkins494 I just wanted to say it's possible. I don't know the price of lenses, nor the price of the other optics. Also prescription lenses will be made for you in particular, with makes them so expensive. If one wants to do that it's probably best to figure out if you can get cheap lenses first and then design the rest of the project around the lenses.
@@robjenkins494 This dose not work when you want there to be no clunky projectors or mirrors on the side of you device. My idea would be to build a functioning computer into the glasses itself, which is possible with technology we do have, such as the small computers in watches and other devices. For control you could either use the gloves like he dose or with more money you could put EEG's around the glasses. How glasses are structured could allow for perfect airflow over all the components with small fans, or even just air holes and proper structuring that would create convention currents though the glasses. You could even create basic programing that will combine the power of other glasses users. Power could simply come from your own body-heat as well.
My brain immediately came up with the idea of using a jewler's loop kind of set up in order to compinsate for the lens issues, though how successful that approach could be is completely beyond my means, I hope you might try it even if it doesn't work at all.
I think the one with the additional lense that you made is good enough. You don't see the world outside of the display with one of your eyes, but that's what you have the second eye for. It's good: you see the display, other people see the display.
add a motorized lens that snaps in (like really quickly) between your eye and the display with a very audible click clack sound for when you actually want to see whats on the screen
I should give this a try - I can see the reflection of my own eyeball in the inside surface of my glasses (I'm *_that_* short sighted) - so it might actually work for me.
Display idea: a lens stack involving a contact which intentionally gives you extreme nearsightedness, a transparent screen, and a corrective lens, in that order. This would mean you could make displays at scales and looks very close to regular corrective glasses, but with the drawback that you'd need glasses, right? Also low power laser diodes but I imagine that might be impossible nanotech
Fun fact, my eyes are horribly nearsighted. One day I decided I wanted to try out Google Cardboard on my Nexus 7. So what did I do? I built a frame out of leftover cardboard, tied bits of paracord to it as an improvised head strap, put my Nexus into this ironically cardboard holder (not even the good stuff, I'm talking milk carton level cardboard), and then popped my contacts out and tried it on. It worked like a dream. As long as that dream was the sad reality of Google Cardboard compared to actual VR headsets. But it was my first steps into VR and I loved every minute of it. Also in reference to the part about no-one being able to focus on a screen that close to the naked eye I have two words for you. Try me.
I clicked on this video because I really want a heads up display and your first video on the subject--as you alluded to within the first 35 seconds of this video--was beyond my present means. Also, within the first 35 seconds I learned that--once again--I will not be acquiring the skills to make the heads-up display of my dreams this evening. That said, all is not lost, because that snappy TH-cam (de)monetization tidbit is a tangible, valuable and imminently applicable weapon in my arsenal of theory to go forth and conquer the algorithm.
This would be awesome for a Borg Halloween costume though. The wearer would see a haze but a bystander would still be able to make out an alien gibberish language
your writing is elegant and your delivery is captivating, i cant look away and i really look forward to each of your vids. I cant tag on to your streams cos your in the free part of the world and I'm not so I'm at work when ur streaming
this was a super good video, iv'e always had an interest in optics and i just love how non-obvious and counter intuitive they are. so complicated and fun lol :)
Why are you actively motivating me to somehow make it work? I have an idea. Semi transparent mirrors or semi transparent mirror on side with eye, and one way mirror on other side of display, like that. Eye, semi tr. mirror, display, one w. mirror.
Instead of designing the optics you can take a page from how old games were designed around the pixel bleed and scanlines of a CRT to design the information displayed to account for it being blurry. This requires a display of the right resolution _and_ color depth, along with a ton of experimentation to get the colors and amount of contrast right, but it can work. It won't be a lot of readable text (maybe 3-5 characters or symbols at most) but for certain applications that may be enough! The simplest example would be using a colored bar to indicate battery level for an RC car or drone. As the battery goes down, the bar changes color.
Testify! I came across this same issue from a different (hah) angle...I built a HUD for my car, reading data from the OBD and putting it on a display was trivial, making it infinity corrected and projecting it onto my curved dashboard without distortion was the harder part...45 degree teleprompter glass was my solution...definite decapitation hazard though...
you can use a convex lens toward the eye for clarity of the display and use a concave lens of the same focal length as the convex one behind the display, this should solve the blurriness of the foreground as a diverging and a converging lens of the same focal length cancel each other out,and if you use a plano-convex and a piano-concave lens the glasses will become slimmer but keeping the cancelation power the same and if the user has myopia or hyperopia then they can change the focal length of the lenses to suit their condition, and (this is speculation but) won't this stop other people from seeing the displayed content unless looked at from a specific angle or distance as the piano-concave lense will scatter the light coming out from the other side.
Can't you still just have a lens enclosure that exclusively covers the OLED, similar to VR? All I really want is a display with AR capabilities that doesn't blind me to the surrounding environment. If your lens is only covering the display, you should still be able to focus on the environment as you please outside of it.
@@ZackFreedman I guess you'd end up doing AR? Easiest way I can thinking of is adding a camera and drawing the camera to the background. sorry for the late reply, I guess I didn't get a notification on this one
When you suggested moving the display further from your face, I imaged that you were going to add an extention to the head band to space the display like a foot from your face. Like a futuristic Pinocchio.
Put a second lens outside of the screen to defocus the "real world" light. Then combine that with the display image with the lens between your eye and the screen.
Have you tried making a pinlight display? It was a technique I saw a SIGGRAPH paper about several years ago placing a grid of pinpoint lights (a side-lit plate of acrylic with tiny indents in to make glowing points) behind a transparent LCD and then doing some form of preprocessing to render unfocussed sections of the image that the pinlight then shine through and bypass the need for the lens.
![[MV] A leap of faith...ความเชื่อใจครั้งสุดท้าย (From "Petrichor the series")](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/U1piZH2CNXA/mqdefault.jpg)
Guys, you should totally watch every one of this guys videos. Also, I seem to be missing a large chunk of money
I already have (90% of them are amazing and so are the other 10%)!
This video was a fail... you tube shows 18:45 but the first half is just static... reload needed?
My bank account is also mysteriously low..
@@CollinBaillie Same! I am really confused what's going on. The video is just blank at those portions!
Probably just a glitch? Can’t believe someone would upload a half blank video smh
same. the skillshare was 1 month free trial or 30% off for a year if i bought today
Jesus. It's like he didn't even think to put a multiverse in between his eye and the display. How could he be so obtuse?
Yeah! gravitational lensing would have taken care of this "problem" so easily!!!!!
“What…What did you call me?”
Or you could take the easy way out and engineer a synthetic eye to replace your own.
BTW, second lens after the display
Just create a little universe of people working for you to shoot photons straight, you know, kind of slavery with extra steps.
It is at least functional as a cosplay prop. even if you can't read the HUD.
Yeah, it really does look the part and it not working would **probably** stop you from getting terrible eye strain.
Everyone else can read the HUD though ... you can have it display "I can't read this, blame the physics engine"
Is it possible to buy this display in orang and yellow?
@@IM2awsme I've not checked, but the common colours are blue and white. If there's a white you could put coloured film over it to have your choice of colour.
@@_Piers_ db cosplays are about to take another step
Hard liquor? Careful, you're getting awfully close to my turf bro!
All of our turfs.
oooh my motivation for making for making projects I know don't work is huffin PAINT
So, you're telling me I can put two of these in front of both eyes and see right through them and walk around all day at comicon with my cyborg suit looking totally legit? This is a total WIN!
I was thinking the same thing for a Borg costume. Just but some cool targeting, tech, etc graphics that would look cool to the outside viewer.
same thing i thought, putting it into my Mandalorian rangefinder, i cant read it, so it dosnt annoy me, but everone else can see its cool
Mount them facing outward with "These things are useless" on one and a QR code linking to this video on the other.
The intro is already golden
Thanks! This one took a lot of development, it had to be a certain length for some reason
Not just the intro the whole vid
agreed
@@ZackFreedman seems like the video got demonetized anyway. they probably did it out of spite.
I know, right?
You need double Fresnel lenses. One to refocus the OLED and a second to undo the first lens behind the OLED. You will have a pixelated real world but you should be able to have them both in focus.
This is what i was gunna suggest
If it looks cool and doesn’t work at least it’s cool, if it looks lame and doesn’t work it’s worthless. This fits the first one for sure
It could be a interesting cosplay prop...
Yeah, it could be useful for cosplay/costumes where you actually want others to see what's on the display, and its not actually supposed to be useful.
It does work.
Create wearable display.
Wearable display is not visible to wearer.
Create many wearable and wireless displays.
Force everyone around you to wear them.
Voila, physics bypassed.
Seeing this live was cool, but seeing this condensed video was even better, wow.
Same i feel like we are in on the build now
K
Zack: "let's put a lens on my eye"
Me, blind as heck with my dummy thicc glasses: pathetic
I was getting hopeful there when he started talking about a lens being used... after an allergy induced microstroke about 8 years ago, my rx on my left eye is about 4 points off of my right eye. but I am so right eye dominant I generally do not notice. still the difference means I would have to get custom glasses made if I ever wanted to use HUD or VR... I was starting to get hopeful when he started about using a lens in conjunction with the display. I would absolutely talk to my eye doc about a set of glasses where the left eye had a very close focal point if the project could work.
@@mattlewandowski73 what do you mean custom glasses made? I just wear my glasses in VR normally, and both my eyes are pretty different prescriptions
You merely adopted the bluriness, I was born in it!
@@marcusborderlands6177 he needs glasses that are essentially non prescrip on one eye, and the other eye needs to be prescrip. so one curved lens one flat lens, 99% of frames are not going to allow for that i.e. custom
So you want to add a SECOND lens in front of the display to pre-un-distort the real world? Won't work either. The field of view and focal point of each eye will be different, so it'll feel like you're cross-eyed.
While you're here, watch Sean's video! th-cam.com/video/sVv1oc14X1w/w-d-xo.html
damn it! I scrolled down here to suggest this!
Put lenses on the other eye as well 🧠
oh ok makes sense, thanks!
What if you are already cross-eyed?
Still not worth limiting your field of view, and the added bulk of 2 lens. The entire point was a less bulky display, and this shows that's not possible.
@@NicholasMarshall how about higher index materials?
Wait a minute. I can make videos on projects that didn't work?! Genius.
...It was just shy of a brazillion.
Mrwhosetheboss: *why thats my job!*
Hahahaahahah the best of all is that you can show us what you've learned so we can learn too! That's brilliant!
Well, lifehack videos do that
Cool video, I just subbed. But my guy, you're so full of crap.
Sincerely, a ghost.
I mean, it didn't fail - he got the expected result. But yeah, I love videos of people's projects not working, and discussions of why. Life isn't a highlight reel, things don't always work out.
Jokes on you, my near-sightedness makes things clear only an inch from my eyes!
I can look myself in the eye on a bright day... I can clearly focus on the reflection of my eyes in my glasses. Maybe Zack should change his eyeball out for a screen, and use a curved reflector to be able to focus the image back at the screen, which is also a sensor. Easy.
Haha, yep, I'm pretty much the same way. Downside is it's like having a lens between the display and the eye for a normal person, the real world is a total blur.
Than this would be perfect to put under your glasses
@@IM2awsme maybe, but with the distance between my eyes and the lenses, it’d either have to be flexible or curved to fit comfortably
@@CollinBaillie Hey, optician here :D Given that the inside of your glasses act as a mirror, the actual distance your eyes have to focus on gets doubled. This makes a huuuge difference close to your eye because the needed refractive power gets exponentially increased the closer you get. You can calculate this: Refraction needed= 1/Distance in metres. Glasses should have a distance of about 15mm to your eyes requiring 66,67 dpt of refraction to see the lens itself. When looking into your reflection you only need 33,33 dpt. Exactly like he said, its physically impossible to make that screen work with our current understanding of optics.
that display could make a good "futuristic" sights for a nerf blaster...
**TARGET LOCKED**
I agree. Maybe for a future project...
ooo with a little ammo counter
Actually it kinda allready exist. Look up the vortex nitron sights.
@@L3gitNinjaMonkey In the Aliens universe, all ammo counters must be red 7 segment LED's. lol
I had my screen 2 inches away from my face when the disk dissapeared and gwen was staring into my soul
I feel like this is a perfect build to mod into a scouter from DBZ.
How much would it cost me each time I crush one of them while yelling "OVER NINE THOUSAND"?
@@RemedyElixir enough for me to want to star a business even if you were the sole customer
Probably over $9000.
and here i was, expecting a wearable with a vacuumer...
'No cones, just lines' sounds like an album title
Noob question: 3d cinemas work with polarization glasses, where each side filters a differently aligned photons. Could similar tech be used to "prealign" the photons instead of a lens so that only orthogonal photons are sent out in the first place?
Unfortunately, no. Polarising filters only block photons with the incorrect orientation, they don't actually align anything. You'd still need a secondary optical system which makes the screen image appear to be at infinity. The ONLY solution is the mirrored secondary optical system which makes the screen appear to be far away. Until someone markets that system cheaply and competently, these glasses are unobtainium.
you can design it like a computer, split them using such lenses/mirrors. next use a some mirrors and prisms, or magnetic fields to rotate the before sending them back to the filter.
Glad I wasn't the only one to immediately think "polarize the light"
@@Chris_the_Muso then why do the Vufine HD heads-up display work inches from ones eye? Because they aren't transparent? How's that work?
@@akaChurch because they still have an optical system... which makes them appear to be far away. It's exactly the same principle just that it doesn't have to be mirrored against an IRL background.
Think about it... unless you are exceptionally short sighted (and I actually was) then no human can focus something only "a few inches" from the eye. There has to be an optical system in there somewhere. Usually, it's closer to the eye than the thing you want the eye to focus on.
We do the same thing with an SLR camera. The ground glass is only a few inches away (but reflected twice in the pentaprism) but the lens in the eye piece allows us to perceive it as being at infinity. Modern cameras with digital viewfinder screens? Same thing.
I HATE that I discovered Zack's channel a few months ago. I wish I discovered it much later. That way I could binge watch gazillions of hours of backlog.... All I can do right now is to watch them more than once. Already started this.
For future reference:
(Present) I _yeet_
(Past/Imperfect) I _was yeeting_
(Past/Perfect) I _yote_
(Pluperfect) I _have yought_
(Future) I _will yeet_
(Future Perfect) I _will have yought_
i am extremely myopic so i can bring the display almost up to my eye and still be able to focus on the disk my nose can literally be touching the screen so no i wouldn't say no one. i would say most people. That being said i can't see far away anyway without corrective lenses so it doesn't really make much a difference the real world is blurry either way
Make a corrective lens that goes behind the display. There. Problem solved. You look through a display at the real world - the real world is corrected. You look at the display - the display is not corrected.
I am withyou as well. and am used to focusing that close to my face
today i learned that contact lens displays will never be a reality...
Not neccesarily. Just need a way for the contact lens to always emit light in one direction. Like maybe thats impossible, but it also might not be.
Maybe the edge of the contact lenses is the display and the middle part of the contact lens is the lens that display the image
@@jetison333 There's another technology we already have that produces light in nearly-perfect parallel rays.
Usually we're told _not_ to point those at our eyes, though.
If the issue is overlapping "rays" and the emitter sits right at our lense, in other words: There is no space for the rays to overlap, shouldn't that work?
Nay. Just interrupt the optic nerve and hack a signal into it. Eventually.
this type of screen would be amazing on a diy vain finder! you would be making a lot of lab tech's, dr and nurses super happy if you could design a portable, light,reliable diy vain finder with this screen
Zack: Thanks for the clear explanation. I'm using it for my Georgia Tech class. One you thing you might cover is the light efficiency of these different optics. One of the reasons it is so hard to get a useful "see through" head worn display for outdoors is the loss of light from the beam splitters. In your example with Glass, the beam splitter is 50% reflective, and the image goes through it twice, meaning that 75% of the light is lost from that process (and then there is the efficiency of the LCOS display). All the "transparent" displays have this problem - some much worse than others. The other problem, as you know from the Moverio you wear, is that the beam splitter looks like a grey rectangle in front of your eye all the time, which is annoying. You can make it less gray by making it more transparent, but then the efficiency is even worse! Grumble. We really need a VERY bright microdisplay. Do you know of any very bright hackable modules? I'm looking for one to put into a scuba mask for our dolphin research.
This was a really, really great video. I love how you have not only upgraded your production quality, but you’ve also become more innovative and seamless in your creative decisions. The illustrations were great (and a perfect device for this explanation), but when I noticed that the old timey voice behind the eyeball stock footage was you… that is some amazing attention to detail. I’m glad you switched to being a TH-camr. You are very good at it.
Hey Zach, what if you used a frenell lense to parallelize the light from the display. To fix the room light issue, use a defocusing frenell lense to create a parallel light from the room, but having the display overlayed?
This.
"put a lens between the eye and the display... makes the world impossible to see" okay, but like... mechanism to move the lens in and out of position? to switch from the world to the HUD like a fckin video game pause menu? ... actually that sounds fuckin dope, lemme get in on that-
"The know it all's among you think you already have the answer"
me, not a know-it all nor particularly bright ahhh colaminated light
"Lenses"
Nooooooooooooo
By the way. Thin film colaminators are a thing and ruin the "put the phone two inches from your eyes demo"
Ikr, I was thinking this too, it's the best solution for a smalland thin overlay for the optics.
You should see the stack of glass on a HUD to remove all color lengths from the projected image and display only green, but still allow you to “see through” it without loosing any color lengths from the real world view in front.
Actually, TH-cam demonetizes you if you swear within the first minute. It also counts censor-beeps as swearing. And it will automatically censor automatic captions.
I hope that "Good Suck" guy never changes their name. I love listening to Zack say "gud succ" every time
I think it would be able to be easily converted to an armband display so that the materials are not entirely wasted.
WDYM!!!??
at 16:04, you just explained how tech like the google glass and your device ARE transparent wearables!!
Other than that complete twist, good vid! Really good explanations! Gives me hope that one day there'd be a perfect lense for VR, where there is ZERO distortion, ZERO glare + god rays, MAX fov
Hey Zack, awesome video! It was great watching it come together on the stream, and you explained it all really well here. Btw, where are you getting those micro displays you were talking about, id love to get my hands on some.
I think if you click somewhere it pulls up a parts list in TH-cam. Just check the description, I guess.
Hi @cyno0_ , Were you able to find the display? I would like to get it as well. Couldn't find it anywhere.
Would be great if you still have the link and could share it. Thanks.
16:19 I know it's a dumb idea, but I'd love to take a crack at this where you pancake the display between two lenses, one lens front side to fix the display and another on the flip side to fix the pass through, but I do also feel like that'd probably end up more like techno goggle displays.
I vote for "yote", as in:
"yoteth thee thy coins towards the screen"
Furries have already taken that, it's short for coyote
Thou shalt not yeet what has allready been yoted.
Your explanation of why the display doesn't work was genius and intuative. Great video!
I hope someone (not me, too much work, unless?) just out of spite invents an OLED-type display that can emit collimated LASER light just because. (Might be good for maskless photolithography if it can be done)
The past tense of "yeet" will forever be "yote" for me.
Also, really appreciate the entertaining way to explain and then visualize the basics of optical physics, if that was my first introduction to the topic (and not a dry textbook chapter) I would've understood it much more quickly.
"Yote" makes me think of "triangle", also known as "canis felis vorus", aka "the cat-eating dog", aka "coyote"
In conclusion, transparent OLEDs are literally awesome but HMDs are harder than they look
Why do we have the same interests
If you wanted to make it work a bit better you could have a converging lens between the display and the eye (as shown), and an additional diverging lens after the display to cancel out the vergence. You would have a different field of view between the eye with the system and without, but the screen and the background could both be in focus
Sooo....if we take the design from 13:38 and add a second lense *after* the display, can we see the display and the "real" world? Like a lense that is convex between eye and display and a concave lense after the display?
That is my thinking as well
Distort the real world light to match the density and general direction of the display then again distort but this time the combined light of the display and real world back to a parallel display
There is one solution in my mind to solve this.
Buy a larger display,
(13:24 ) that can should cover 80% or more of the field of view of one eye.
Use a camera to film what is in the front of the eye ( everything that is blurred).
Show data on display on top of the live video feed of "reality" on front of you.
When you don't what to see any data on display you just turn it off and you will see reality as it is instead of a live feed of a camera.
That's the magic of a thin transparent display.
Please do that.
Huge fan here!
What about a collumating layer, that just filters out light that isn't going straight. The light from the world is already straight so it wouldn't interfere with that
Lol, I was thinking, just put a layer of really small tubes on the surface.
It'll grey out the transparency a bit, but I imagine it'd unblur it 👀
Even better, the other myopics have been saying, "Put your corrective lenses behind the display, I can focus that close to my face already!"
It needs to collimate the light from the display but not the light passing through (hence the need for beamsplitter and an offset display)
I just had a huge revelation thanks to you! I always wondered why when i dont have my glasses, i can make a tiny hole with my finger, look through it and things are clear... you made me understand what's going on there, thanks!
For me, when I did the experiment with the disk, the disk just became bigger.
They look like the Cardassian head's up display they used in Star Trek DS9
0:38 I'm a cyborg
Authentic content like this is rare, even the patreon shoutouts were entertaining
10/10 went to Zack's patreon and gave him all my life savings 😵
Good. GOOD!!
Huh, I don't remember any part of the video where he told us to do that.
@@2aryanpro never claimed he did, but I must have been so impressed with this video I had the overwhelming urge to donate all my money to his patreon
The video did kind of start abruptly.. no intro or anything. Must have been gaming the TH-cam filtering algorithm or something... I get some sort of nagging sub-conscious thoughts about Zack swearing at TH-cam.. something weird.
All hail the hypnotoad!
I appreciate you letting me build whatever I want no matter how stupid it is. Thanks Zack!
Quick question, @Zack Freedman, would a truly transparent OLED display be possible if one put a lens on the inner part of the display to focus the display itself... and a lens on the outer part to bring the rest of the world into focus?
I was thinking this too! I wonder if that works?
thanks for putting the songs in the video in the description, one of them helped me track down a classic "Tyrone Davis - In the Mood"
do you have any recommendations for the cheap micro displays that you showed, I need to win a bet with an Air-force fanboy friend of mine.
Dude bro. I would not at all mind flipping down a lense every time I want to look at my HUD x3
Ok, but what if you put a thin polarized sheet in front of the display?
It's an OLED, not an LCD
This is really cool. I wish I was smart enough to think of how to do this.
What if you have a lens behind the display that makes the light traveling though un-parallel so the lens in front will make that light parallel again, so you get both.
I guess you could if you wanted to do this at home - but the point is that at that point might you not be better off just using one of the other kinds of displays?
I had the same thought. It should work, but you need sufficiently strong lenses. Also your lenses should be flat on one side each so they can touch each other (with the display in between). This is necessary that objects from outside aren't bigger, this would give you a headache probably.
I don't know how cheap or expensive this would be, but maybe you can still save money if the other optics are this expensive.
That's the thing though - lenses are expensive. Especially quality ones custom to an application.
Just ask anyone with a photography, or astronomy hobby, or anyone trying to buy prescription lenses without insurance.
To your point - What you're describing is in all likelyhood theoretically possible - but that doesn't make it a good idea and you're adding so much extra custom optics, that you might as well go with the existing tech.
@@robjenkins494 I just wanted to say it's possible. I don't know the price of lenses, nor the price of the other optics. Also prescription lenses will be made for you in particular, with makes them so expensive.
If one wants to do that it's probably best to figure out if you can get cheap lenses first and then design the rest of the project around the lenses.
@@robjenkins494 This dose not work when you want there to be no clunky projectors or mirrors on the side of you device. My idea would be to build a functioning computer into the glasses itself, which is possible with technology we do have, such as the small computers in watches and other devices. For control you could either use the gloves like he dose or with more money you could put EEG's around the glasses. How glasses are structured could allow for perfect airflow over all the components with small fans, or even just air holes and proper structuring that would create convention currents though the glasses. You could even create basic programing that will combine the power of other glasses users. Power could simply come from your own body-heat as well.
My brain immediately came up with the idea of using a jewler's loop kind of set up in order to compinsate for the lens issues, though how successful that approach could be is completely beyond my means, I hope you might try it even if it doesn't work at all.
what if you added a second lens on the outside that was concave, then wouldnt it bring the environment back into focus?
after testing it in a simulator, yeah i think so
I think the one with the additional lense that you made is good enough. You don't see the world outside of the display with one of your eyes, but that's what you have the second eye for. It's good: you see the display, other people see the display.
I think it is pretty good and doesn't suck
It is just big, too close to your face and looks like shit
Oh well it sucks
That is the smoothest ad segue I've ever seen, holy shit and good work
Obligatory first
actually first this time
Nice
You did teach me something cool. I can see individual pixels (with my glasses off), when I put my screen against my face.
Ok but put a concave lens after the display and it's fixed.
add a motorized lens that snaps in (like really quickly) between your eye and the display with a very audible click clack sound for when you actually want to see whats on the screen
I should give this a try - I can see the reflection of my own eyeball in the inside surface of my glasses (I'm *_that_* short sighted) - so it might actually work for me.
Display idea: a lens stack involving a contact which intentionally gives you extreme nearsightedness, a transparent screen, and a corrective lens, in that order.
This would mean you could make displays at scales and looks very close to regular corrective glasses, but with the drawback that you'd need glasses, right?
Also low power laser diodes but I imagine that might be impossible nanotech
This seems like a cool idea, don't know if it would work though
Blind the eye one side to the real world with 24 hours display is pretty convincing
I was thinking "i am nearsighted enough for this to work" and completely forgot about the glasses also needing to let you see the real world.
Fun fact, my eyes are horribly nearsighted. One day I decided I wanted to try out Google Cardboard on my Nexus 7. So what did I do? I built a frame out of leftover cardboard, tied bits of paracord to it as an improvised head strap, put my Nexus into this ironically cardboard holder (not even the good stuff, I'm talking milk carton level cardboard), and then popped my contacts out and tried it on. It worked like a dream. As long as that dream was the sad reality of Google Cardboard compared to actual VR headsets. But it was my first steps into VR and I loved every minute of it.
Also in reference to the part about no-one being able to focus on a screen that close to the naked eye I have two words for you. Try me.
13:46 "This heads up display is malarkey but this heads up display is amalarkical" *adds amalarkical to everyday lexicon*
I clicked on this video because I really want a heads up display and your first video on the subject--as you alluded to within the first 35 seconds of this video--was beyond my present means. Also, within the first 35 seconds I learned that--once again--I will not be acquiring the skills to make the heads-up display of my dreams this evening. That said, all is not lost, because that snappy TH-cam (de)monetization tidbit is a tangible, valuable and imminently applicable weapon in my arsenal of theory to go forth and conquer the algorithm.
I swear, I remember an IBM ad as a kid for a similar device a little over 20 years ago.
If the oled lens combo was moved into just the corner of your vision, you could totally make a corner HUD out of it.
Thanks for resting the case I didn't know needed resting.
This would be awesome for a Borg Halloween costume though. The wearer would see a haze but a bystander would still be able to make out an alien gibberish language
your writing is elegant and your delivery is captivating, i cant look away and i really look forward to each of your vids. I cant tag on to your streams cos your in the free part of the world and I'm not so I'm at work when ur streaming
this was a super good video, iv'e always had an interest in optics and i just love how non-obvious and counter intuitive they are. so complicated and fun lol :)
Why are you actively motivating me to somehow make it work? I have an idea. Semi transparent mirrors or semi transparent mirror on side with eye, and one way mirror on other side of display, like that.
Eye, semi tr. mirror, display, one w. mirror.
I always watch til the very end to see the patron names lol. Love this channel
Huh. Being able to see right through it honestly makes it more useful for cosplay. Animated eyes that you can easily see through.
Instead of designing the optics you can take a page from how old games were designed around the pixel bleed and scanlines of a CRT to design the information displayed to account for it being blurry. This requires a display of the right resolution _and_ color depth, along with a ton of experimentation to get the colors and amount of contrast right, but it can work. It won't be a lot of readable text (maybe 3-5 characters or symbols at most) but for certain applications that may be enough! The simplest example would be using a colored bar to indicate battery level for an RC car or drone. As the battery goes down, the bar changes color.
Sounds like you need a thin Fresnel lens between you and the display to columnate the light.
Testify! I came across this same issue from a different (hah) angle...I built a HUD for my car, reading data from the OBD and putting it on a display was trivial, making it infinity corrected and projecting it onto my curved dashboard without distortion was the harder part...45 degree teleprompter glass was my solution...definite decapitation hazard though...
That intro had me on the floor oh my God XD
Oh that's why those cardboard VR things need the little lenses so you actually see your phone
While it wouldn't be good for a teleprompter or something, that headset and display would be very cool in a cosplay application!
you can use a convex lens toward the eye for clarity of the display and use a concave lens of the same focal length as the convex one behind the display, this should solve the blurriness of the foreground as a diverging and a converging lens of the same focal length cancel each other out,and if you use a plano-convex and a piano-concave lens the glasses will become slimmer but keeping the cancelation power the same and if the user has myopia or hyperopia then they can change the focal length of the lenses to suit their condition, and (this is speculation but) won't this stop other people from seeing the displayed content unless looked at from a specific angle or distance as the piano-concave lense will scatter the light coming out from the other side.
Can't you still just have a lens enclosure that exclusively covers the OLED, similar to VR? All I really want is a display with AR capabilities that doesn't blind me to the surrounding environment. If your lens is only covering the display, you should still be able to focus on the environment as you please outside of it.
If the lens is only covering the display, how can you overlay virtual objects on the real world? You need both in focus.
@@ZackFreedman I guess you'd end up doing AR? Easiest way I can thinking of is adding a camera and drawing the camera to the background. sorry for the late reply, I guess I didn't get a notification on this one
When you suggested moving the display further from your face, I imaged that you were going to add an extention to the head band to space the display like a foot from your face. Like a futuristic Pinocchio.
I really wanted to, and I even had a slide whistle sound effect picked out. I just ran out of time to print anything new.
Put a second lens outside of the screen to defocus the "real world" light. Then combine that with the display image with the lens between your eye and the screen.
I was able to still see the hypno disk by going cross eyed when I got to close
Have you tried making a pinlight display? It was a technique I saw a SIGGRAPH paper about several years ago placing a grid of pinpoint lights (a side-lit plate of acrylic with tiny indents in to make glowing points) behind a transparent LCD and then doing some form of preprocessing to render unfocussed sections of the image that the pinlight then shine through and bypass the need for the lens.
This video is perfect, no other words just pure gold
I really enjoyed your description of light and sensors.
Guys, you should totally watch every one of this guys videos.
The whole time I was waiting for a polarized lens to enter the equation. I guess I was way off.