I'm doing work now for the university Brain Research lab that I'm managing, and suddenly realized that it could be quite easy to make a good and efficient personal projector, that would be (hopefully) easier on the eyes, compared to the current "blaring" screens, and goggle devices.
The idea is to make something similar to Doug Hofstadter's vanishing words experiment, as described in Metamagical Themas, where, as he gazed at text, an eye tracker was following his eye movements, and rapidly replacing the text just where his eye was about to jump to. It shouldn't cost much to do this, and the projector could figure the distance to the screen / wall / ceiling that you are looking at, and project to there accordingly.
On the other hand, and on second thoughts the downside of this would be that the head has to be steady so that only the eye movements are determining your gaze. Or maybe not. My two friends (one is very sick for the past few years) had developed a tracking device for creating 3d images according with a person's gaze. The company was 3dreality, and died along with the rest of the 2000&x software economy bubble, and the falling towers of NY.-- pashute, Jan 08 2014 Dennet talk on TED http://www.ted.com/..._consciousness.html [pashute, Jan 08 2014] Sorry for resuming my idea bombardment habits, but this one was a must.-- pashute, Jan 08 2014 What happens to peripheral vision? If a light turns off - or on - at the periphery of my sight, I'm very aware of it. For this reason, I don't think this would work.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 08 2014 Meant Daniel Dennet (in Consciousness Explained). The phenomenon is called Change Blindness and builds on the very small "Saccadic Memory" needed for understanding vision.
Douglas had a similar encounter with students, (standing around him, excited and laughing) in the fake Turing test.
Well Max, you can be skeptical about it, but, just like you can watch a movie about a fire without feeling the heat and smelling the smoke, so you can ignore the non-existent natural movement on your peripheral vision - it only catches movement, double eye shapes, or rapidly changed brightness.
Or as Dennet says in the linked TED talk: "It doesn't seem that way, but your getting in a lot less information than you think"-- pashute, Jan 08 2014 // Well Max..//
No, I'm very well acquainted with the vagaries of the visual system, and with the fact that what we "see" is actually a model constructed on the fly from very limited visual information.
However, in a curious inversion of that paradigm, we also process information that we're not aware of, including that from the periphery of our visual field.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 08 2014 Where will your next saccade go? Your periphery data tells you, as does your internal model.
So, you would likely need to add in lo-res images all around, to help the periphery, and save the hi-res image for only your focal area.
In fact, I heard the CEO of Unity3D talking about this very thing, although within the context of 3D glasses that would display hi-res only on your focal area to save on CPU & battery.
And, glasses would work better than a wall projector in a multi-user environment as well as glasses solve the head orientation problem.-- sophocles, Jan 09 2014 Yep, saw this demonstrated at siggraph (computer graphics convention) last year, its called a "foveated display". It renders more hires detail where you are looking, for an order of magnitude faster rendering. Could be very cool for VR games. It could be geometry, textures, resolution, shader complexity all become more simple towards the edges of vision-- cthulhuJon, Jan 10 2014 random, halfbakery