

How two Valve engineers walked away with the company's augmented reality glasses - gu
http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/18/4343382/technical-illusions-valve-augmented-reality-glasses-jeri-ellsworth-rick-johnson

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cookingrobot
This is the weirdest approach to video glasses I've ever seen - really clever
but strange. (that's not necessarily a bad thing)

They put 2 projectors on the glasses, pointing out. These are obviously
extremely weak because they're so small, but the trick is shining the light at
a retro-reflector [1] which bounces almost all the light directly back where
it came from.

So even though the projectors are so dim you'd barely be able to see the image
normally, it's apparently bright enough since a significant fraction of the
light energy is bounced directly back to your eye. I assume they're using 2
projectors because the angle of return is so focused that it wouldn't be
sufficient to use one projector between the eyes.

My only confusion is I don't get what this has to do with augmented reality.
All that cleverness just emulates what a normal monitor can do - display an
image to a person. The head tracking stuff is a completely independent system
of camera and IR light, just like a wiimote sensor. Anyone have thoughts on
why they need this new imaging system?

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector>

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raganesh
My respect for Gabe Newell just went up:

 _Says Ellsworth: "Gabe was completely behind it... I talked to Gabe, and he
talked to the lawyers, and he's like, 'It's theirs, make it happen,' because
he could see we were passionate about it."_

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dragonbonheur
It's appalling how the Verge commenters see this purely as a gaming device and
not as a serious/less creepy competition for Google glass once the FPGAs are
replaced by ASICs.

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justncase80
Based on the looks of that thing, maybe that's why they got canned?

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gee_totes
Eeee gads, RTFA

They were canned (after discussions with Gabe Newell), since Valve strongly
wanted to go on the Virtual Reality direction, not Augmented Reality, and the
team wanted to be free to work on their AR solution.

