OE-2.2 Displays & Head-Mounted Systems
You can describe head-mounted display architectures, compare augmenting with fully immersive displays, and match a display type to an application.
This is the hardware unit: display fundamentals, optical architectures, and the family tree of devices from monocular AR glasses to a room-sized CAVE. The useful axis is how much of the real world the device lets through - augmenting displays add to what you see, immersive ones replace it, and every design consequence follows from that choice. Smartphone-based displays are worth attention because they are how most people have actually experienced VR.
Work through these
Component technologies of head-mounted displays
What is actually inside a headset, part by part. It grounds the specifications you will otherwise compare without understanding.
Display fundamentals and related terminology
The vocabulary for comparing displays: field of view, resolution, refresh and latency. Settle these before reading any product comparison, including the ones below.
Optical architectures
How the light gets from the panel to the eye, which is where the hard engineering is. It also decides the weight and shape of the thing on someone's head.
Augmenting displays: binocular and monocular
Adding to the real view with one eye or two, which is a different problem from replacing it. The choice constrains everything else in the design.
Fully immersive displays; PC- and console-driven displays
The replacing kind, driven by a machine with real graphics power. Comparing it with the item below is the practical purchasing decision most people face.
Smartphone-based displays
The same idea using hardware everyone already owns. It is why this field reached ordinary users at all, and its limits explain the rest of the market.
CAVEs, walls, hemispheres and domes
Putting the display around the room instead of on the head. Older, still used where several people must share the experience, and free of the weight problem entirely.
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