@@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
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.
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! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sVv1oc14X1w.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 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.
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 RU-vidr. You are very good at it.
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.
@@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?
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.
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.
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_
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 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
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.
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.
"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"
"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-
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
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
Actually, RU-vid 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
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
The video did kind of start abruptly.. no intro or anything. Must have been gaming the RU-vid filtering algorithm or something... I get some sort of nagging sub-conscious thoughts about Zack swearing at RU-vid.. something weird.
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)
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!
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?
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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 :)
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 RU-vid (de)monetization tidbit is a tangible, valuable and imminently applicable weapon in my arsenal of theory to go forth and conquer the algorithm.
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.
One thing I always wondered about and would probably actually prefer to transparent displays would be a literal overhead display, as in, rather than have the screen floating in the middle of the vision, have it at the top of your vision. This would simplify the optics considerably since you don't need to care about the real world getting in the way. It is inherently less useful because you can't really do XR, but small screens on headsets are generally crappy at XR anyway because they are horribly underpowered unless you use a phone or something else attached to it. XR is better used in full, dedicated headsets or on phone versus just a small single lens system.
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
This is my first video I have watched from Zack. I feel the stars have aligned to provide me a window into my personality-doppelgänger. That is, of course, if I could overcome my anxiety and my high level introvert ness (is that a word?).
I'm anxious and extremely introverted. Nothing will ever overcome it. You just need to bull through it and fight until it gets you, then wake up the next day and try again.
what could've been done was put a flat lens in front to allow the image to be clear, and then direct them to a second lens allowing for both far and near sighting
Smaller, opaque display with similarly shaped lens in front for focusing. It will not be as cool as a "transparent display" (or collimator), but it should be way cheaper. Also, it would allow to retain some peripheral vision.
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.
Have you considered focals by north? It's a projector that projects directly onto your retina by reflecting off of a holographic film. Pretty cool tech, but Google shut it down
