Nearing on a year from its first unveiling, it's nice to finally see the
Headplay Personal Cinema System head mounted display "out and about." That Visor headset is stilling rocking support for up to XGA resolutions with a pair of single LCoS micro-displays that are supposed to reduce eye strain, while the Liberator "brains" of the operation accepts composite, component and S-video inputs, while also playing media off of its built-in CompactFlash slot and USB ports. Finally, the Navigator remote acts as the hook-up for the included earbuds, and allows you to control the system and settings. In addition to plain old flat content, you can view stereoscopic 3D games and movies if you've got the right hardware to plug into. The Headplay is available now online, and goes for $499, or $549 with an internal rechargeable battery. Unfortunately, all we've got for pictures is those same old renders we saw at the start of the year, but hopefully Headplay will hit the true wild soon enough.
posted September 20th 2007 4:06PM
I can wait to start walking into walls with this thing
wow 800 X 600
Are there any "goggles" with better resolution (and wide screen) out there?
So I just found TDVisor 720p head mount.
Any body tried a pair?
Minor complaint, but when are we going to drop this whole VGA/XGA/SXGA terminology? It's confusing unless you already know what they stand for. Why can't you just say 640x480 or so on?
I think having two distinct numbers makes for a confusing naming convention. That's why HDTVs are 720p, 1080i, 1080p -- the bigger number is obviously better (though the qualifier may matter, for various reasons). I never liked VGA/XGA/etc because in a vacuum, presented with the following list:
VGA
SVGA
XGA
SXGA
WSXGA+
it's probably not readily apparent which is better, or for what reason. I think we should just adopt the vertical resolution with some character to signify that we're talking about a name -- "I have an x1200 monitor" sounds clearer than "I have a 1200 monitor" -- and would mean 1600x1200 or 1900x1200 depending on aspect ratio, which is probably either obvious (if you're looking at it) or described elsewhere (if you're reading e.g. a spec sheet or ad). It would be much better for me if they said my Nokia 770 had a "wide x480 screen" than "WVGA" or whatever variant they actually use in the literature.
Anyway, the HMD looks pretty cool, but they use the old line about "support" for up to 1024x768 -- they "support" it by crunching it down to 800x600, the actual native resolution. It's worse than the hard drive size lie ^H^H^H marketing you always see. Also, they don't give much info on the "3D" support -- I get the impression each eye is driven separately, but there's only one input of each type (also, I don't see any mention of component, contrary to the original post) so both parts of the stereo signal must come in over one VGA cable. I have the sinking feeling this would mean it works best with only specific video cards, and/or that individual 3D games would need tweaking to work right. I hope I'm wrong -- when these come down in price as the next generation of HMDs becomes available, I might try to ebay one ;-)