Show HN: DIY virtual HDMI monitor using "AR" glasses

I use AR glasses heavily for work and other things. I'm actually typing this on a pair right now. I've never understood what the application for environment locked screens is other than novelty/marketing. My glasses provide enough sensor data to implement this but I just can't be bothered.

Yes that's correct, and it could be expanded to other features yes, one thing I've been mulling over is mult monitor input which you don't even get on devices that support what I did here natively

It is indeed hard to assess from the video at 19s? (Relatively impressive thru-the-glass perspective ntheless!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6w5kAA22TsP&t=19s

Is it me or is there some dynamic here that could/should be further exploited to implement what you suggest

It's also a Viture-specific project, but I suspect if the author wanted, this could expand to other video display glasses in the future and he could simply rename the project.

I’m staying at a friends and using my laptop and a second monitor of his to work. I’ve wondered if the Xreal Air 2 would be better than a large monitor. My hunch is that having a dedicated smaller monitor not on my face is more comfortable and productive than a large virtual one.

From your experience would you agree?

The Xreal Air 2 Ultra look pretty interesting.

After using both 3DoF and 6DoF for years, I just can't imagine using a 3DoF headset for more than watching videos or simple writing tasks.

I'm actually a bit jealous about the XReals. Back when I bought the Viture I wanted to buy XReal first but they had such strange shipping policies ( they shipped to every county around me but not to Austria ) so I went for the Viture.

Is the xreal usable outdoors in bright conditions?

I have to look into that, thanks.

I've been thinking about combining it with our work on the reverse engineered HTC Vive Ultimate Tracker stuff here https://youtube.com/shorts/U4vhEPQw-Uo to get 6DOF

But realistically I ( and nobody else ) won't strap the tracker to my head all the time

The display panels used for AR(and some pre-Oculus VR) displays are completely different thing from normal LCDs. Lots of them used to be a reflective panel made of silicon wafers with RGB front lights flashing in sequence. Driving circuits and interfacing protocols are all non-standard, under NDA, and quite complicated. The panels also needs to be coupled to a complicated optical lens - they're just magnifying glasses, only fancier. The complete thing that has a digital input and an optical output is often referred to as an Optical Engine.

What that means is, these glasses are made by someone paying $$$ once to Asian engineering companies to have it figured out, and everyone reuse that exact setup for years on.

And companies like Sony or Canon, they develop stuffs by scraping engineers off a wall instead of first throwing them at the wall, so every Sony or Canon cameras and projectors come with novel viewfinders and crazy patented lenses. Or panel suppliers like Kopin, Epson, or Sharp can arrange contacts to engineering consultants. I guess. Same likely goes for all the Chinese companies too, though I'm not familiar enough on that front to be able to offer googlable keywords.

Startups and even mid-sized consumer electronics companies don't have that kind of time or financial backings or margins to do the same. They barely manage to pay for assembly and ship it. And so the spec of the final product is whatever spec of parts that they could buy off the shelf.

What about Apple? Well, they pay to have 2 extra display factories built for redundancy by policy - I'm sure that most military organization don't do that. And even then they use a rather simplistic, completely concentric and rotationally symmetric optical design.

(I kind of have a crazy idea to bypass some of that, but unfortunately I'm crazy and so is the idea)

In my experience you need at least 8k per eye to get sharp text. But if you just want to watch a movie 4k will look very crisp and 1080p@30hz also works for movies.

So what you get is basically a larger mobile screen for watching videos, something that competes with video projectors, but you can use it on the bus. It's an easier sell compared to a device that will give you a good reading experience and competes with paper books.

Those of us that want to use them as terminal emulators are still too few.

Not disagreeing with the resolution but I assume for most last-gen use cases it didn't make much sense because you also need to be able to drive that somehow and you can be happy that you get a 2 Lane display port interface up until the more recent phones.

So if you have high res displays that no one can realistically use for the intended mobile cinema use case then you are wasting money and energy

The screens are two entirely different products. The current Sony micro-OLED screens being used by product manufacturers for AR glasses require out-of-plane reprojection versus VR headset screens which require focal lenses.

The top-of-the-line solutions by Sony used in current products only go up to 1080p120.

I don't know what I would do with higher resolution personally. This is already enough that xterm's "tiny" font is extremely hard to read. Personally I'd prefer lower power draw to more resolution.

AR glasses have smaller FOV which means that a lower resolution can still achieve a higher peak pixels per degree compared to a VR headset.

One of the reason is IMHO that the optical resolution with those lense designs does not get better than 1080p. It seems even that resolution is blurry at the edges. So anything beyond probably would be a waste without totally different optics.

It's a packaging problem. They don't have the luxury of placing relatively large screens in front of the eyes.

AR solutions value mobility over fidelity. This has numerous repercussions, leading to those displays.

Because the glasses are much smaller than headsets, I'd assume.

Apples to oranges, since VR glasses are a much bigger form factor.

If I had XReal I could look into that too, it's probably pretty similar to how it works for the Viture.

Regarding the HDMI on Quest 3, I believe it was sometime last year when they made that possible https://www.meta.com/help/quest/1350679463006443

If you connect the glasses to your computer you get a fixed screen in front of your eyes (like those display glasses back in the day that promised to give you a huge screen), which is fine for video viewing but if you want to use it for productivity you want to be able to look at certain parts of your screen vs. straining your eyes to glimpse the edges.

That's where this comes in, it allows you to look around the virtual screen with the added bonus that you can connect it to almost anything and behave the same not just your PC

I own them, bought just recently. The eyes have these circular wheels near your eyebrow above the frame that lets you independently adjust the distance for each eye, if that's what you're talking about.

So far I haven't had any issue but I haven't done long tests yet. I'm using BredOS not their official OrangePI images though

This exists, sort of. I got a demo of these at a YC event a couple months ago and was very impressed. The back is opaque, though, so it's not real AR, but it does accomplish "E-Ink displays in a glasses form factor":

https://solreader.com/

you still would need a backlight but it's an interesting idea