Building a 3D printed HMD and asking some questions.
Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2014 7:15 am
Hello, this is my first post apart from the "say hello" one, and I don't even know from where to start, but I want to say that I am really excited after experimenting 3D for the first time yesterday on a (sort of) HMD!
I ordered a 7 inch 1280x728 LCD screen from ebay and 2 pairs of different magnifying glasses. Two of them are aspheric lenses but are 35 mm or something in diameter and the others are spherical but larger, 50mm. I think I prefer the spherical ones for being larger, but I'll have to experiment more.
I am thinking about the advantages of custom printed HMD. The plastic part is cheap and can cheaply be sent to friends around the world, or printed at local fablabs provided they have the .stl files. I found a couple solutions with adjustable interpupilar distance and I confess that I even considered it, but it seemed to me that that was an overengineering approach. Also, with simple math one could just enter in a program the interpupilar distance, lense dimmensions and amplification, screen distance and the model would be generated. In case that doesn't work, one could just build many models for every configuration possible and upload them for everyone to 3D print whatever suits them.
Now, I admit I don't know much about HMD's, but that's why I'm here too . I would like to ask if crossover, or crosstalk, I don't know the proper name (it's the left eye seeing the right part of the monitor and vice versa) is important in HMD's to the point that one should always separate the view with a perpendicular opaque board in the middle (or something that completes the same objective). I've seen DIY models that do that, others that don't.
Also, is there any guide that helps understanding the optics behind HMD's? I'm finishing a Masters in Physics Engineering, but I only had a course that had a little optics in it, and we never accounted for distortion (I don't want to brag about it, in fact I barely made it in most courses even when my peers got good grades, so I'm just giving some context). The distance from the screen is easily the lense focal distance so we get paralel rays reaching our eyes "from infinity", but what is the relation between that, the screen dimensions and lense diameter? For the moment I'm not considering fresnel lenses, but that can change.
I intend to make my models available online for free. I know anyone with basic modeling skills can do it, and maybe they had, I just didn't found a customizable solution available yet.
Last but not the least, have a cute kitten as a thank you in advance
I ordered a 7 inch 1280x728 LCD screen from ebay and 2 pairs of different magnifying glasses. Two of them are aspheric lenses but are 35 mm or something in diameter and the others are spherical but larger, 50mm. I think I prefer the spherical ones for being larger, but I'll have to experiment more.
I am thinking about the advantages of custom printed HMD. The plastic part is cheap and can cheaply be sent to friends around the world, or printed at local fablabs provided they have the .stl files. I found a couple solutions with adjustable interpupilar distance and I confess that I even considered it, but it seemed to me that that was an overengineering approach. Also, with simple math one could just enter in a program the interpupilar distance, lense dimmensions and amplification, screen distance and the model would be generated. In case that doesn't work, one could just build many models for every configuration possible and upload them for everyone to 3D print whatever suits them.
Now, I admit I don't know much about HMD's, but that's why I'm here too . I would like to ask if crossover, or crosstalk, I don't know the proper name (it's the left eye seeing the right part of the monitor and vice versa) is important in HMD's to the point that one should always separate the view with a perpendicular opaque board in the middle (or something that completes the same objective). I've seen DIY models that do that, others that don't.
Also, is there any guide that helps understanding the optics behind HMD's? I'm finishing a Masters in Physics Engineering, but I only had a course that had a little optics in it, and we never accounted for distortion (I don't want to brag about it, in fact I barely made it in most courses even when my peers got good grades, so I'm just giving some context). The distance from the screen is easily the lense focal distance so we get paralel rays reaching our eyes "from infinity", but what is the relation between that, the screen dimensions and lense diameter? For the moment I'm not considering fresnel lenses, but that can change.
I intend to make my models available online for free. I know anyone with basic modeling skills can do it, and maybe they had, I just didn't found a customizable solution available yet.
Last but not the least, have a cute kitten as a thank you in advance