Cinemizer OLED HMD+iPad Augmenting Reality : Taking Mobile HMD and AR beyond Google GLASS limits at the Grand Canyon and Apple HQ

Can you see the light, can you see the light shining from my face ?..the late great Jeff Healey used to shout at his mesmerised audiences. Jeff Healey was a person who took a perceived weakness adapted and augmented his guitar playing, enhanced it to point of being one of the greatest guitarists in history. Now we are not all born with the talent to adapt or develop skills to Mr Healey's level but technology is moving further down the road to being able to give us augmented abilities ..    

To date hmd fans have largely only considered Augmented Reality through the Google tinted looking GLASS. With only a chosen few actually experiencing what Google term and define as AR. But GLASS as an AR defining device has it's limits. What if we were  to look beyond current GLASS  and AR usage paradigms ? What if we actually want to seek to benefit from augmenting a real world physical task like photography or filming? Not tag a photo with GPS, or take a photo with voice, or indeed share it, no what if we actually want to improve and enhance the act of taking that photo in adverse conditions like extreme sunlight? Using a HMD to actually perform better at a task rather than simply aping a task.. Let's take a look at Augmenting the Reality of photography and filming, and how a 2013 cyberpunk like you or me can outdo the sun.... so what do you think? Can you see the light ?

Lost or unleashed in the Great US of A, having escaped E3 2013 and LA I gravitated .. naturally to the nearest tech haven, no not Oculus VRs headquarters in San Diego ,where the O Team were busy in meetings recovering from E3 and securing several millions of dollars of funding ( hi Steve thanks for trying ! Universal was great..) but East ...  

And so it came to pass I was standing in San Jose, with time to kill and the whole of Silicon Valley surrounding me ...Ennio Morricone playing in my head... Presently I found myself at the  Tech Museum whose exterior was adorned with a several story mural promising  a Star Wars exhibition that on entering you learnt was going to happen sometime in the future oh I thought just like the promised Episode VII and my consumer version of the Oculus Rift . Inside taking advantage of the air con, I asked a kind lady the way to Apple and Google and Facebook...A printer whirred and out popped Google Map navigation instructions. Which of these three great tech giants would I visit? Well I hopped on the first bus that turned up  at the end of the square as instructed and I was off, air conditioning cooling me down in 90 degrees of dry heat. 

Hopping off the bus and walking a couple of miles in said dry heat, to reach 1 Infinite Loop I walked in and made my intentions clear to the Apple front desk person, another kind lady. 

I was there to test the Cinemizer OLED with the Apple iPad 3, promptly an Apple PR person arrived and said you can as long as you do no steal any secrets.. To which I agreed ..Not even needing to sign anything on an iPad or do the secret Apple handshake  They then let me film outside Infinite Loop.. nice people, Apple people...thanks for the opportunity!

So let's get serious the aim of this test is to:

1. Show how mobile use of hmds will dominate VR and AR fields. People have begun to talk of VR and AR pioneers ...but they talk from the developers side, both VR and AR fields are going to evolve also through the user side..Your hmd's users will in time be considered just as much  pioneers as the developers of hardware and software  and it is they who who ultimately pay your wages once the Angel/Troll funding dries up. Users  will dictate the future use and direction of hmds, VR and AR..and commercial viability and take them beyond what many reviewers consider today as mere gimmicks. Google understand this, other hmd/VR/AR companies need to catch up to this. Or you may just develop 17000 apps that no one uses or has use for...

The recently publicly released LEAP Motion is also presented with a similar issue: good against developers is one thing ...good against users ..that is something else.. ( sorry Mr Lucas). I love the LEAP as a piece of hardware but how are people on the street going to see it or use it?

Portable computing and hmd usage, mobile hmd usage of the kind you see tested below,  exists and is viable now.

Much more on this next time : back to the test:

2. The real world aim of this test is to solve a problem. 

Problem : 

When using your tablet or phone in bright sunlight as a camera, or even your swanky new large touch screen camera, the display blacks/whites out due to the brightness of the sun. You can usually just about make out where to click to take a picture, but in all honesty you are hoping things work out. 

A transparent hmd like Google Glass may work with some shades, but you still cannot view film or take pictures in their natural form. In fact in total bright sunlight that display is going to be obliterated also..and or it will become difficult to select images in bright light.

You also cannot view pictures in high resolutions deemed necessary by serious photographers , or view 1080p video.

So what if you want to be able to see a crystal clear unadulterated image or video that you can then capture without any hindrance from sunlight?

Solution: 

Exploiting a portable opaque OLED HMD as an Augmented Reality device :

When I use the term opaque, I mean totally light blocked, like the Cinemizer OLED or the smd ST1080 with light blocker. Put these on and very little if any direct light can get in to affect the display.

Outside Infinite Loop and out of respect for Mr Steve Jobs, simply connect your iPad (or iPhone) to your Cinemizer OLED hmd. Using Lightning connectors and the old HMDI connector depending on your model of Apple device. Both devices have portability and power sorted and you are now wearing a portable computing device,seeing through the iPad or iPhone cameras using the hmd. There are around 10 hours of power on your iPad and around 2 to 3 on your Cinemizer without having to recharge.  

Now you can take pictures and film in bright light and actually see a 40 inch OLED view of what you are photographing or filming. Nothing, no significant light can get into the screen that is set 2m away from you on your hmd, you can still look down to the iPad or the ground. But you have eliminated the sunlight obliterating your phone or tablet or camera view finder or display. Allowing the hmd/tablet user  to pick and chose what you film in these conditions instead of just blind guessing and clicking in bright sunlight as so many people around me were doing with the same tablets and later phones:

Here is the video I filmed wearing my iPad 3/ Cinemizer OLED hmd setup : This one's for you Steve (Jobs that is not Steve from Oculus, you will have to wait till I find a mobile power source for my Rift dev kit rev 1):

This was cool because there seems to be a special vibe you get using an Apple product at 1 Infinite Loop and of course because it worked! And because of the comments of passing people who noted that GLASS was already surpassed. 

And this brings me back to the point on users not just developers influencing products. In our connected world a simple user like me can also be a developer present at E3, or outside Apple connecting with hardware and software developers, aiding or commenting and ultimately influencing the evolution and use of these devices. You can do this now, for yourselves and companies that listen or place a modicum of value to this new type of feedback stand to gain and in some cases could at the very least  gain a sense of humour ...

Speaking of connecting, my day at Apple over I headed over to where they all eat watched a football game and a couple of days later woke up in Vegas ...from where I promptly felt the need to use the Grand Canyon as a testing ground for my new found way of using hmds ... and meeting yet more game developers...

Cinemizer OLED+iPad 3 vs the Grand Canyon 

At the Grand Canyon, South Rim. The heat was close to 100 degrees, the sunlight obliterating every phone, camera and tablet display except mine: a perfect test ground for the Cinemizer OLED and iPad 3 camera set up. Check it out ... 

Using the Cinemizer HMD also enhanced taking pictures with the 5MP iPad camera , the 13 MP Samsung Galaxy S4 rear camera .. through the Cinemizer HMD, with a 40 inch crystal clear OLED display as my view finder. So when people around me were experiencing blacked out phone and camera screens like so 

whatever the resolution or power of the Camera on this phone, the light renders photography or filming as guess work

I was standing in almost the exact same spot able to take pictures like the ones below : that actually looked clearer and sharper than the display you are using now to view them ( unless it is an OLED display!) 

if we want to look over the edge we no longer have to lean over the edge , just point the camera downwards and the hmd displays the view : 

we can also take pictures using the front cameras of the iPad 3 and S4 and of course still see what we are taking pictures of on the HMD , even look behind us whilst looking forwards with the S4's dual camera mode...

This being me of course video games follow me everywhere even to the arid 100 degree desert. As luck would have it I found myself with a party of most excellent Japanese tourists, into which I blended Altair style, being flown to the Grand Canyon on a propeller powered flight that was more impressive in terms of a thrill ride than the Universal Studios Transformer's ride the Oculus Team had sentenced me too several days earlier (only joking Palmer!)...I mean Michael Bay you should try this ..and you get to experience it on the way there and back. So regaling one of my fellow travellers with tales of my Nihon adventures,  discussing the sights and comparing experiences of Japan and Tokyo I discovered the dude worked for Capcom...  

So from Nevada to Arizona and back again , in a shakey prop plane that would have had Indiana Jones jumping out in a life raft, this amazing guy and I talked about Hachiko  and Capcom games development through a translator as my Japanese is pretty rusty, since I last used it to play Samurai Warriors RPG on a SNK Neogeo.. 

Providence... All in all I probably got a longer interview off the cuff with a Capcom employee re Capcom than most journos at E3...

So there on this journey to and from the near 100 degree heat of Grand Canyon and  waiting for our plane back I argued against DLC and Capcom's reliance on it. Sadly I was told it was here to stay. But there was good news too, it was here in an air conditioned airport lobby that I got to first learn of Street Fighter V ( and beyond) and more Resident Evil, or Biohazard as my Japanese friends preferred to call it. 

I also talked 3D and hmd gaming with the Capcom employee on the plane ride. I play Res Evil and many Capcom games in 3D with headtracking already as you can see here  . Capcom however on consoles at least have no great faith in 3D gaming, it seems most Japanese developers take on it is that this was a fad for a couple of years. There seems to be no great push for 3D or hmd gaming. In fact a complete lack of confidence in it from what I could glean. This is significant for hmd makers and so called VR pioneers, either a sign of wisdom or shortsightedness on Japanese developers part...we shall see..in the game..

Here in the Grand Canyon thousands of miles from the gaming caves of the UK , without any Internet connection or working phone, thegameveda still manages to get gaming information ... dedication ...or perhaps these guys follow me around or perhaps this is providence or karma maybe?  Every time I try to leave....

Sometimes it pays to leave VR and check out some actual reality... the whole video games and tech sector needs more humanising ..people need to meet outside name events too...  more to follow including a diatribe on how and why the future of VR and hmds lies in your pockets... 

If you are out there in bright sunlight with your expensive or cheap camera, know then attaching a hmd like the Cinemizer OLED can and will enhance your photography.. and in doing so you just augmented reality... see the light?

Just remember to have someone pull you back from the edge or you will be filming your descent Google GLASS style, albeit using superior OLED displays...

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