Developed under a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract for the Army Soldier Systems Command, the lightweight glasses are not expected to provide an immersive VR environment, as high-end HMDs do. But the technology will be immediately applicable for so-called augmented reality applications, in which displays are used to superimpose virtual aspects such as text or graphics over a real image. MicroOptical's ClipOn display provides a see-around information display at a fixed focus of 1 meter.
Users can order the eyepieces with different settings.
An example is a printed circuit board production environment where the addition of text and graphics might help a technician eliminate time-consuming references to a manual. Although conventional HMDs position an LCD in front of each of the user's eyes, MicroOptical engineers have shrunk the size of their device by splitting the problem into image creation and image presentation. The glasses operate by taking an image generated by a computer, VCR, television or other electronic device and generating an image on a miniature LCD that is placed in the temple portion of a pair of glasses or in an L-shaped optics module that clips onto the temple. The light rays from the display are relayed to the eye through reflectors within the eyeglass lens. The reflectors fold the optical path and magnify the image so that it can be viewed comfortably.