Sutherland head-mounted display
The Sutherland head-mounted display is a head-mounted display and rendering system created by Ivan Sutherland in the 1960s. It was the first head-mounted display with images generated by computer graphics.[1]
The head-mounted display was designed and built under the direction of Dr. Ivan E. Sutherland at Harvard College. It was completed and tested at Harvard in August 1968, only a few days before Dr. Sutherland brought it to the University of Utah. Some portions of the hardware were immediately put into use at Utah, but the display itself was not again used for viewing synthetic computer-generated objects until the first day of 1970.[2]
The mechanical system is informally called the Sword of Damocles. It does not masswise support the headset. The headset is very light and rests its weight on the user's head.[3]
There is a research publication by Ivan Sutherland outlining the details of the system. In the research publication, he claimed that the fundamental idea behind three-dimensional displays is to present the user with a perspective image that changes as he moves.[4]
The head mounted display has IPD adjustment capability.[4]
The display hardware in Sutherland's HMD consisted of six separate sub-systems: a headset, a head position sensor, a general purpose computer, a matrix multiplier, a clipping divider, and a display vector generator.[2] The acoustic head rotation tracker was designed and built at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory by Charles (Chuck) Seitz and Stylianos Pezaris.[5] Seitz later designed the matrix multiplier.[5] Robert (Bob) Sproull simulated, designed most of, built parts of, and debugged the clipping divider.[5] Two others that were part of the project were Ted Lee and Dan Cohen.[5] Ted Lee developed programs to display curved surfaces using stereopsis from binocular disparity.[5] Dan Cohen developed programs that used the entire system, which formed the basis of the example programs shown.[5] Quintin Foster supervised construction of the equipment.[5] Stewart Ogden helped with the project.[5]
It was later re-used for the Sorcerer's Apprentice system.
Construction[edit]
Each temple piece of the spectacles is a miniature cathode-ray tube (CRT) which is 6 inches long and has a 13/16 inch diameter screen. A 2-D projection drawn on the CRT face is reflected from an enclosed mirror into a series of lenses and finally to a clear glass eyepiece. Through the center of each eyepiece is a combiner, a partially reflecting silver plane that directs the picture into the observer's eye. The observer thus sees a virtual image of the 2-D projection superimposed on his normal visual field.[2]
Bob Sproull and Harry Lewis were students who worked in Sutherland's lab while at Harvard.[1]
Before the debut of the system, Ivan Sutherland had done some preliminary 3D-tracked display experiments during late 1966 and early 1967 at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.[5] These experiments involved a system that presented a visual to only one of the observer's eyes.[5] The acoustic head position sensor, which operated in continuous wave mode, could operate for a few minutes at a time before piling up errors.[5] The coordinate transformations and perspective computations were done by software in the MIT TX-2 computer.[5] This system was used to view a 3D line drawing of cyclohexane in augmented reality.[5]
Computer history museum[edit]
In 2022, the head-mounted display was photographed in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California as part of a documentation effort by students of Scott Fisher.[6]
The system was photographed by Nathan Fairchild, a USC graduate student.[7]
Research[edit]
Two separate positioning systems were explored: A mechanical system and an ultrasonic tracking system. The ultrasonic system has three transmitters which transmit at 37khz, 38.6khz, and 40.2khz respectively.[4]
Specifications[edit]
- About a 40 degree field of view.[4]
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Sutherland HMD". 2024-10-23. https://immersivearchive.org/ivan-hmd.html.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Lee, Vickers, Donald (1974). Sorcerer's apprentice: head-mounted display and wand. https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s65d99bt.
- ↑ "Nextgen AR Glasses: Autofocus, Telepresence, Personal Assistants". 2024-03-06. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKKtVvFcR2A.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Sutherland, Ivan E. (1968). "A head-mounted three dimensional display". ACM Press. p. 757. doi:10.1145/1476589.1476686.
- ↑ 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 5.10 5.11 5.12 Ivan E. Sutherland. "A head-mounted three dimensional display". https://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/lok/teaching/ve-s07/papers/sutherland-headmount.pdf.
- ↑ "The Remarkable Ivan Sutherland". 2023-02-21. https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-remarkable-ivan-sutherland/.
- ↑ "VR History MN 112023". 2023-10-19. https://computerhistory.org/vr-history-mn-112023/.