Any AR utility (relating content to the real-world scene) from a transparent display that isn’t attached to ones face is going to be highly constrained to work with exactly one specific position of the viewer, and a narrow frustum/viewing angle and have depth-of-field focus issues to boot. Plus no stereoscopy.
Yeah, that would be an interesting application, less intrusive, more environmentally blended displays that don’t glow and use almost no power.
I suspect that the reason that the new Apple Vision device uses re-generated scenes via cameras on internal opaque displays is there is an almost overwhelming challenge posed by the massive dynamic range in light levels found in common spaces. Matching to lighting in both indoor and outdoor scenes in a translucent HUD has to be difficult. (IMHO IANAHUDE)
That is nuts! I fashioned basically this in the early 00’s with a sidewalk scored LCD panel - worked OK, but did eventually have issues due to the radiant heat of the overheads lamp. Made for some novel “movie nights” with early web video content.
There are obvious and compelling reasons(such as the numbers in your post) why the various proprietary Unix workstations were devoured by commodity hardware; but there’s undeniably something so cool about them. And Tadpole’s stuff was even cooler than average. Unaffordable then and unobtainum now; and sadly folded into some corner of General Dynamics; not sure if entirely shut down or still doing atypically paranoid wintels as they were for a while.
I can’t say that I’d want to lose the ability to run linux on hardware that’s practically disposable; but it doesn’t feel the same.
Aside from the heat issues you mentioned, and the premium paid to not DIY, I’m pretty sure I remember Sun devices being…picky…back in the day. DB13W3 and sync-on-green; which, even with the appropriate mechanical adapter, limited your options a bit.
Oh, boy. Yeah, I don’t miss that connector even a little bit. We had both Sun and SGI monitors; they both used the 13W3, but they were wired differently…
What about one-way transparency. You can look through your screen but they can’t look back through to you. Seems like there might be some use cases for that sort of thing, perhaps.
Can this technology do that?
In principle I have to respect going with actual RF-style connectors for the three high-bandwidth analog signals handing color channels; but (like a lot of things classy Unix workstations did, in retrospect) the downright distasteful “I’m going to shove video signals over a connector design that’s really more at home handling serial ports…” VGA approach of just YOLO-ing signal integrity turned out to work better than it had any right to, even toward the upper end of resolution/refresh rate combinations that were actually purchasable as monitors before digital interfaces took over.
There was that one oddball workstation CRT, IBM I think, that used the hilariously contradictory DVI-A; because DVI’s connector actually had better quality design on its legacy analog pins than VGA did; but for the most part VGA just worked: embarassingly, it usually even worked at resolutions beyond single-link DVI; which made for an awkward couple of generations in the cheaper seats when you had to actually ignore your (single link, because that’s cheaper) DVI output to reach your monitor’s full resolution.
It’s hardly perfect; but, now that we have displayport, futzing with analog video is not a retrocomputing thing I look back fondly on. Though, admittedly, we’re now plagued by the obnoxious and seemingly pointless displayport/HDMI feud; which has its own problems.
I imagine they are very useful to the billionaire class, who want to make sure you aren’t playing minesweeper when they think you should be making money for them.
They don’t need transparent displays for that. There are plenty of software solutions to monitor content/usage on employees’ devices in real time already. And that includes BYOD.
