This is the weirdest approach to video glasses I've ever seen - really clever but strange. (that's not necessarily a bad thing)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector</a>
My respect for Gabe Newell just went up:<p><i>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."</i>
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.