Comment Been there, done that... (Score 2, Interesting) 183
Back in '95, working for a DoD contractor, I saw a demo of some augmented reality gear being proposed for equipment troubleshooting and maintenance applications. The goggles were the same material used in head-up displays, coupled with an earpiece/microphone/camera in the headgear.
The microphone provided input for possibly the best voice input setup I've ever seen to date, in that it actually recognized a user saying things like, "yeah, uh-huh" and similar grunt/groan acknowledgements. The goggles were linked to a rather cool pattern recognition system. A small status bar in the side of the display provided a couple of icons to let the user know they were on the right track, a smiley/mr. yuck set of icons provided a status as to system "lock" status (or not).
The major downside to all this was the hardware in '95 to support all this was rather intensive. I recall 3-4 towers, plus a custom-built rather hefty cube-shaped box (no, not a next cube) that handled all the pattern-recognition processing and voice input. Oh, and the hefty wiring to the headgear.
Other than that, pretty darn cool back in '95...
The microphone provided input for possibly the best voice input setup I've ever seen to date, in that it actually recognized a user saying things like, "yeah, uh-huh" and similar grunt/groan acknowledgements. The goggles were linked to a rather cool pattern recognition system. A small status bar in the side of the display provided a couple of icons to let the user know they were on the right track, a smiley/mr. yuck set of icons provided a status as to system "lock" status (or not).
The major downside to all this was the hardware in '95 to support all this was rather intensive. I recall 3-4 towers, plus a custom-built rather hefty cube-shaped box (no, not a next cube) that handled all the pattern-recognition processing and voice input. Oh, and the hefty wiring to the headgear.
Other than that, pretty darn cool back in '95...
