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Ozan CakmakciGraduate Student,Optics for head-mounted displays, ODALAB 
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 Summer Palace, Beijing, China, 2004. email: firstname.lastname [at] gmail.com
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News: The following design has been accepted for publication in Optics Letters Vol.32, No.11 (July 2007).
Ever since I saw Mark Spitzer's (CEO of Microoptical) design during the International Symposium on
Wearable Computers (ISWC) in 1997 I wanted to learn how to design head-worn displays that fit
within the eyeglass formfactor. I sent an email when I was an undergraduate student at
Michigan State U to the wear-hard mailing list [online archive available here] looking for help on
prototyping such devices.
After this posting, I worked at research labs for a few years, writing proposals, and building electronics related to
wearable and ubiquitous computing for various European Union and consortium projects. I always had the eyeglass-based display
problem in the back of my mind, I went on to earn a degree in optics working with Prof. Jannick Rolland to learn how to build such
devices. I received my master's degree in 2004 and I am still working towards my Ph.D. There is more work to be done in this area.
My first design was assembled during the weekend of November 17, 2006. All the optics and opto-mechanics are custom designed.
The design was presented as a full paper at the Optical Society of America International Optical Design Conference, 2006,
Vancouver, Canada. Also, a poster of it was presented at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) 2006
in Switzerland.
We now have a protototype of this design and here are some pictures:
The current specifications are:
To our knowledge, this is the first display to achieve such specifications in the world. A U.S. Patent has been filed.
Head-Worn display design space includes several choices. We chose a see-through design, acceptable pupil size, as compact as possible, and a full color display (not single color).
These choices naturally impact the design in terms of number of elements, types of elements, size of the end result, etc.
We are limited by our choice of a magnifier as the optical design form, for example, the volume will scale with the field of view,etc.
The unique parameter is the low element count while achieving all other parameters mentioned above and staying robust.
Robustness means loose tolerances. One major worry in an off-axis design like this is the potentially tight alignment tolerances.
Tight tolerances mean that the elements may need to be positioned down a micrometer in space to work.
This design has loose tolerances which means it does not need to be positioned down to a micrometer in order to work.
The current unit accepts standard VGA input and we are using the Kopin VGA 640x480 panel taken out of an ICUITI.
It is common practice to use off-the-shelf microdisplays when developing head-worn displays. We focused on the optical system design.
We are aiming for see-through and stereo for the next prototype. We hope to finish that by March '07.
Send me an email if you are interested in further discussions:
ozan[dot]cakmakci[at]gmail.com
I would like to thank Jannick Rolland for all her support and Adam Oranchak for designing the opto-mechanics!
Recent results from ACM Computer human interaction, User Interface Software and Technologies, International Symposium on Wearable
Computing, Ubiquitous Computing Conference, International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality conferences will probably be of
interest to the readers.
If you are interest in alternatives to Head-Worn Displays, an excellent survey is provided by Oliver Bimber and Ramesh Raskar
in their book titled "Spatial Augmented Reality".