Vuzix Wrap 920 AR (review with lot's of photos)

[Johnny-Mnemonic]

Hello guys!
I've made detailed review on new Vuzix Wrap 920 Augmented Reality HMD.
It's on VRtifacts: http://www.vrtifacts.com/hmds/vuzix-wra ... -hands-on/







Enjoy, hope you will like an article!

[cybereality]

Thanks for the review. Interesting read. Looks like a lot of fun.

[Johnny-Mnemonic]

Thanks cybereality!

[3dvison]

Dam know this makes you want to spend money on AG stuff.
Can the AR kit from Vuzix also be hooked-up to the wrap1200 models that will be coming out ?

[Johnny-Mnemonic]

AR-version is not the Kit.
AR is complete HMD even with it's own "case", camera's are not detachable.

[PalmerTech]

Wow, great review! Looks like it would be a lot of fun to play with, I am glad to hear that the quality of the optics is improved over the VR920, bodes well for the VR1200.

[Johnny-Mnemonic]

Thank you PalmerTech!
I'm working on one interesting software project right now, involving these glasses, I will show you guys when it will be ready...

[3dvison]

I am glad to hear that the quality of the optics is improved over the VR920, bodes well for the VR1200.

So do all the Wrap 920's have these new optics and we would hope the Wrap 1200 will ?

The part about 1024*768 resolution being better looking and even usable on the Wrap 920AR is very good news. I think most felt 1024*768 resolution was useless on the VR920 so that says somthing about the new optics.

Maybe if these new optics are used in the Wrap 1200, 1280*768 resolution will be usable also.

Hey Johnny your artical says, "Wrap 920 AR have two true 752 x 480 LCD color screens which are located inside visual module casings and project image down into lens/prism system"
Are the LCD screens you look at 752x480 ? I thought all the Wrap 920's and VR920 were 640x480 ?

[Johnny-Mnemonic]

Hey Johnny your artical says, "Wrap 920 AR have two true 752 x 480 LCD color screens which are located inside visual module casings and project image down into lens/prism system"
Are the LCD screens you look at 752x480 ? I thought all the Wrap 920's and VR920 were 640x480 ?

I also thought it's 640 x 480, even guys from Vuzix say so. But, when I got the device I found that 1024 x 768 mode looks much better than I expected and also a screen itself is a little wider than 4:3 aspect ratio. I tried to run a few test's to get "real" resolution, but get confused quickly

Then I found this press-release:
http://www.vuzix.com/site/_news/1_7_10- ... 1FINAL.pdf
Here Vuzix say that WrapAR have 752H x 480W rez.
I can't be 100% sure, but looks like true for me.

[3dvison]

"The stereo camera pair delivers a single 1504 x 480 side-by-side image that can be viewed in 3D stereoscopic video"

Half of 1504 would be 752, so maybe the cameras each have a resolution of 752x480 but it gets scaled down to fit 640x480 LCD screens ?

[cybereality]

Thats interesting if Vuzix did this. Kind of strange, seeing as the 1200 line uses 852 x 480 panels, and there are a bunch of models with the 640x480 displays. Wouldn't it be cheaper to use the same panel, and not some odd resolution like 752x480 for just a low-volume product like the 920AR? Maybe its just a typo? I mean it says:

752H x 480W

So what is H and W? Height and Width? Horizontal and... Doesn't match up. Maybe they made other typos.

[Johnny-Mnemonic]

Thats interesting if Vuzix did this. Kind of strange, seeing as the 1200 line uses 852 x 480 panels, and there are a bunch of models with the 640x480 displays. Wouldn't it be cheaper to use the same panel, and not some odd resolution like 752x480 for just a low-volume product like the 920AR? Maybe its just a typo? I mean it says:

752H x 480W

So what is H and W? Height and Width? Horizontal and... Doesn't match up. Maybe they made other typos.

Can be typos, but they could use some other type of screens in AR version. I'm not sure that my unit have 640 x 480 screens (even if it's pretty logical for Vuzix to use the same visual module). But even if it is 640x480, just like in regular Wrap 920, it looks superior than VR920.

[cybereality]

Well, I don't doubt it looks better than VR920. I should certainly hope it would. And it may indeed have this 752x480 res screen. Or maybe its just a matter of the optics. I've got the Wrap 310, and the optics are way better than VR920. Even at that low resolution it still looks nice, and I can wear without my glasses. I imagine the other Wrap models use similar quality optics, so their process has improved since the VR920.

[Johnny-Mnemonic]

In free time I started to play with Vuzix maxReality AR software, it can do many interesting things off the shelf, for example blue-screening.

Here, take a look a 2D demo:
[youtube-hd]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaoqjDLu8Iw[/youtube-hd]

And 3D:
[youtube-hd]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0at1_IT67I0[/youtube-hd]

Sorry for lags, it's because of capturing software.

[cybereality]

Thats pretty cool actually.

[Johnny-Mnemonic]

Here is a small example of how you can create Flash-based stereoscopic 3D AR application compatible with Vuzix Wrap 920 AR.
Demo based on FLAR Toolkit and Papervision3D. Project is open source.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TAiWJUsIwg[/youtube]



Stereoscopic and monoscopic (for simple webcams or mono AR HMD's) examples included, both for regular FLAR and it's alchemy branch (alchemy variant works faster).
Source code is commented, you can check ActionScript3 code on the page, or download whole project:
http://3dvrm.com/flar/

Hope this will be useful for someone!

[cybereality]

Very cool. I think you forgot the link to the source code, though.

[Johnny-Mnemonic]

Very cool. I think you forgot the link to the source code, though.

Thank you! I really forgot, now it's fixed, link is in the post

[mrfahrenheit94]

Thanks for the videos. It's really awesome. I just hope someday it becomes mainstream and affordable (without compromising quality).

[mAchiNE]

It occurred to me that AR devices like this one (not see through ones though) could actually be really useful for some types of VR setups in the future.
Take a racing simulator for example, with modern racing games having such highly detailed cockpits playing with a high field of view HMD would feel like being in the car visually and if you have a racing "cockpit" setup like most sim racers it would start to feel very immersive, but how can you see your actual Racing steering wheel and shifter? if you have to allow a gap at the bottom of the HMD so you can see your real steering wheel and shifter then you will start to lose the illusion of being in the virtual car as you will be looking outside of the virtual world to see where to put your hands.
Well with an AR HMD using cameras you could potentially program a game that uses the cameras and special color coding or AR symbols on your hands, steering wheel and shifter to "sync" these things in the real world with the virtual world (like how motion capture is used in movies to animate a computer generated character using a real actor but in real time on a small scale) so when you move your hands from the steering wheel to the shifter in real life the computer generated drivers arms copy what you do exactly and steering wheel/shifter are in the same position in the virtual world relative to where they are in the real world.

This idea could be applied to many VR uses, flight sims for one and any VR setup with interactive devices that are not permanently attached to the user during the simulation, also for a mobile VR setup in a confined space you could program it to show you where the walls are when you get too close before you run into them