Google recommended this video & it's relevant to the RC hobby drone industry VR goggle market.
Long ago after she disappeared from Goo Tube, there was a story about her getting sh*tcanned from a startup that was doing this ridiculously complicated VR project & now she was trying to sell it alone. It sounded like they hired her to do this idea which they thought of, then she got attached to it, but in actuality it was her idea all along.
There must have been a huge ergonomical benefit to using head mounted projectors, a head mounted webcam, retro reflective material, IR leds, active shutter lenses. The only obvious advantage is it could include practical objects in the VR world.
Detecting head position is a huge win for VR glasses. It's hard to see why no-one has done it. It's very hard to track the position of an indoor object, but VR glasses aren't constrained by the requirements of a flying vehicle. The ambient lighting required by machine vision can be controlled. The update rate doesn't have to be fast.
She does it with a glasses mounted camera detecting ground based LEDs. It would have been much easier to use a ground based camera tracking glasses mounted LEDs. The problem no-one can solve is detecting where your pupils are converging.
She could have probably already shipped something really basic, with low definition & bulky electronics, but she doesn't seem to have a final product in mind, just endlessly trying to reduce the size & increase resolution. Something really complicated with no obvious goal is the kind of thing that makes money from the crowd. She conceded that the reflective material is too cumbersome & offered a glasses mounted reflector while still sticking to the head mounted projector. It might be a case of being too far invested in the projector idea to go back to the simpler glasses mounted display.
The 1/2 million raised so far may seem like a lot, but it took lots of trade shows, traveling, & knocking on doors, not just signing up on kickstarter. There seems to be an infinite amount money available from crowdfunding, for a certain price. Everything alive & breathing now seems to get at least $100,000, but there's obviously a limit. A lot of projects have to not get anything for the few to get $100,000. The money tends to concentrate on the Rube Goldberg machines.
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https://www.spaceglasses.com/
I love the look, very Fallout 3
This isn't VR, it is AR which is VR in reverse (projecting 3D in the real world).
Right PeteD as I recall, Valve decided to concentrate on pure imersive conventional style VR headset rather than these fairly unique real world interactive ones.
My guess is in the long run what we will end up with in the very long run will combine the characteristics of Regular VR headsets with these via selective transparency.
And that video overlays on objects will be handled by the display, not little projectors.
I suspect head position and orientation will be determined without requiring external bits like LEDs also.
Now there's an idea that really could chew up some of those crowd-funding Rube Goldberg dollars Jack.
She didn't get fired from some "startup" it was Valve. It was a pretty big news story in tech/gaming circles when it happened. But no information was given as to why Jeri et. al. was fired. Now we have some more insight. The OP writes this like he doesn't even know who Jeri Ellsworth is.
An interesting concept with limitations, read about it first some time ago.
I think this is the site for their current endeavor: http://technicalillusions.com/
VR Goggles all have severe limitations (Including Occulus) and the technical challenges are still huge.
Most people dont really want to have the equivalent of a large pair of binoculars strapped to their head (Occulus and Sony and using them to interact with your environment means you really need selective transparency like Googles "Glass"s.
The Google Glass's only overlay a small image on your visual field of view which means they are not usable for immersive VR.
And the Sony and Occulus type goggles are huge and completely opaque meaning the only thing they are good for is immersive VR and neck vibrator sales.
This is a potentially revolutionary market, possibly eliminating conventional electronics displays completely and becoming a significant means of human augmentation.
But there are still a lot of technical barriers to overcome.
too late buddy
Hope the hot glue does not stick to head. Yep ,looks like Johnny five is dead.
She killed and cut up Johnny Five