I hope most of us have watched iron-man and got excited on certain parts of the movie. Everyone got their personal favorite. My favorite is the HUD(Heads Up Display). This inspired me to start a project in this. Not head mounted like an oculus rift. But more of a wearable like a bike helmet.
So my questions are how the depth of various images are projected in his helmet. Is it better to project it on a glass screen or replace the glass frame with a thin bendable LCD. Which is better or has less constraint on the user's eyes. We are not going to play 4k videos but just get multi-colored widgets. Like this one.
If observed closely some widgets are placed forward and backward (3D). Do we need a 3D projector or a display or is there a way to trick the eye to make it look like 3D?
I apologize if this is in the wrong section. Please help me move it to a more appropriate SE rather than just closing the post.
Best Answer
All you need for a 3D effect is different screens for each eye. You need a stereoscopic display, like an Oculus Rift.
From your question it looks like you think a Rift wouldn't work because you're trying to get a HUD that looks like the one in your video. But you need to imagine that HUD from the point of view of Tony Stark, not from the view given in the video. To him, it looks like things floating out in front of him in 3D.
I'm one of those guys that bought the Rift on Kickstarter. Let me tell you, it is amazing. The resolution for first developer kit is crap, like playing a PlayStation One game. But the 3D effect and head tracking is incredible. If you were to modify a Rift type device to re-display video from stereo cameras mounted the the front of the device, and overlay your HUD on top of that, you'd be in business.
You can't use a transparent screen and display a HUD onto it without some very fancy optics in front of the display, because you can't focus that closely. The easiest solution is to watch a stereo video and add the HUD to it.