Eyetop Head-Mounted Display

The Eyetop is unique in the field of consumer head-mounted displays. It consists of a single tiny color LCD mounted in a pair of Terminator-style sunglasses. Other head-mounted displays (such as the old Sony Glasstron and the iGlasses) have two LCDs – one for each eye, but are worn to the exclusion of seeing what’s going on in the world. The idea of the Eyetop is that the display is supplemental to the world, allowing the user to have a constant video display of whatever the user wants; laptop screen, PDA screen, MP3 player display, portable DVD etc.

The Eyetop is made up of two parts; the glasses and the control module. The glasses are thick wrap-around polycarbonate that somewhat distorts the users vision (which the company says will be fixed in production). The nosepiece on the glasses is adjustible, and the earpieces are flexible, making for an overall very comfortable, if dorky, pair of sunglasses. On the outside of the glasses is mounted the LCD module.

The LCD module is about 1.5” wide and 1.5” deep, and is fitted permanently to the outside of the glasses. The LCD on the Eyetop is positioned about 30 degrees off-center of the right eye, and displays about 13 degrees of image (but because of the bulk of the LCD module, takes up the remainder of the users field of vision). On the LCD module two adjustment wheels allow fine-tuning of focus and for position.

The LCD has a resolution of 240x320, which seems rather low, but because the screen is so small images are fairly sharp, and certainly crisp enough to distinguish with a rich 65,000 colors. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not like watching a 42” plasma T.V., but the contrast, sharpness and color of the display is impressive for its small size. One unfortunate problem with the screen is that there is significant color shift with any rapid eye movement. In other words, a quick glance at the screen will make the colors streak for a micro-second.

The glasses are connected by a two-foot cord to the control module, which is 1.25” x 3” x 4”. The module, designed to be worn on the hip with the included belt clip, contains the four AA batteries that power the unit for 10 to 12 hours. There are four buttons on the control module; one for power, and three that cycle through the brightness and contrast adjustments. There are just two ports on the control module, one for input from the video source, and one for output to the LCD. The output is proprietary, but the input is standard RCA video…which leads us to the first and most significant problem. There is no audio input, which means no audio output. That’s right; there are no earphones included in this set. More about this problem later.

So with such a wonderfully dorky device strapped to your head, just what can you possibly do with it? Well, with a properly outfitted PDA you could surf the web as you stroll around, checking bits of information on the sly. To have this sort of set up, you’d need something like the Toshiba e750 or HP iPaq 5400, or other PDAs with internal WiFi or GSM, plus a CF slot. You’d also need to have an RCA-out port from a peripheral like the Margi Presenter-To-Go that plugs in to the CF slot. But even with this set-up, you’d still need to look at the PDA to navigate the web, so the utility of the Eyetop is questionable.


Another option might be to hook it into one of the new multimedia jukeboxes, such as the Archos Multimedia Jukebox or the upcoming RCA Lyra video player. But the Eyetop’s lack of audio features make it particularly useless with the Archos or any device that uses the same out port for audio and video. While it’s possible to watch videos on the AJMM through the Eyetop, or just to use the Eyetop as a way to navigate the menus of the AJMM, it’s impossible to actually listen to music or any audio while doing so. This design flaw is the most crippling – without RCA audio-in capability and included ear-buds, the Eyetop is almost useless with the current generation of portable entertainment devices.

Of course, if you have something like a mobile DVD player or TV tuner that has RCA out and separate jack for headphones, you could both watch and listen to the program through the Eyetop. But you really shouldn’t be watching a full-length movie on this device. The manual recommends that you take a break for 15 minutes for every half-hour of viewing, and that’s probably a good idea. Other than quick glances at the display, looking up-and-right for prolonged periods can cause significant eyestrain.

One of the other recommended uses for the Eyetop is as a supplemental display for a camcorder. Hooking up the RCA-out from the camcorder to the Eyetop would allow the user to see what’s being taped while also viewing the peripheral scene more easily. But once again, the functionality of this proposed use is limited; the Eyetop’s display would make it less easy to see the subject of the taping because of the relatively small size of the screen, and most camcorders these days have a nice big LCD of their own that flips out for easy viewing. If your current camcorder doesn’t have one, spending $700 on the Eyetop seems likes a bit of a waste when you could just get a new camcorder.

Bleeding edge utility includes hooking up devices such as a portable X-10 infrared camera for mobile FLIR, or setting up a GPS so that you could have a positional display everywhere you go. All of these sorts of things would require significant expense and wiring, once again reducing the utility of the Eyetop.

As a first effort, the Eyetop is a pretty good device. With a little refinement, it might actually make it into the realm of useful gadgets. Slimming down the controller module and perhaps even doing away with the cable to the glasses would be a good place to start with the redesign. Making the LCD more subtle to others is also important if this sort of device is ever to be accepted – people will simply not wear this sort of thing if it means everyone is staring at them like they’re some kind of cyborg. A slide-out OLED – or even two of them – would make for a good feature in the next generation of this device. Including some sort of wireless connectivity, either WiFi or Bluetooth, would allow users to attach a wider range of devices and eliminate cables. Finally, audio must be included in the device to even have a chance of making it useful for multimedia purposes. Without ear-buds and audio inputs, some devices that the Eyetop is intended to be used with are completely incompatible, and others require too much additional wiring.

The idea of the Eyetop is a great one – it’s definitely worthy of the Object Value award, and qualifies as The Coolest Gadget I Will Never Use. With a mobile display integrated into a pair of not-so-ordinary-looking sunglasses, the theoretical possibilities are limitless. But the fact is that for extended video viewing, you would want a binocular display and audio. For mobile computing, the utility is just not that great considering it’s much easier to use one device like a PDA for controlling and viewing the information you need. About the only place that it might be useful to have a head-mounted monocular display is when driving, and I shudder to think what kind of drivers we’d have if people started watching CNN on something like the Eyetop while talking on their cell phones and barreling down I-95.

nate -[Wednesday, July 23, 2003]
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Related Link:  Eyetop