Warren Robinett describes the state 
of the Head-Mounted Display Projects in 1990. 
Aside from giving an insight into the basic functions 
of this "data helmet", he lists the most important 
possible applications in the field of medicine such as 
for example the specific planning of radiotherapies, 
3D-ultrasound scanners and the exploration of 
three-dimensional shapes of complex molecules.

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Warren Robinett

Contributions of the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:

HEAD-MOUNTED DISPLAY PROJECT

OVERVIEW:
Wearing a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) puts a human user inside of a three-dimensional, computer-simulated world. Because the positions of the head and hand are tracked by the system, the user can move through this virtual world, turn to look m any direction, and use gestures of the hand to interact with simulated objects. The image of the virtual world seen by the user is adjusted up to 30 times per second to correspond with the position and orientation of the user's head. The full-color, wideangle, stereoscopic headgear provides a slightly different image to each eye so that the computer-generated scene appears fully three-dimensional to the user, and the wide-angle field of view gives him or her the feeling of being immersed in a computer-generated arlificial reality. The user also hears sounds triggered by events in the virtual world, such as two simulated objects bumping into each other.

Two new capabilities are currently being added to the system. We have a forcefeedback subsystem, the Argonne Remote Manipulator (ARM), and integrating this with the HMD will allow the user to touch objects in the virtual world using the ARM's handgrip. Adding a second HMD to the system will allow two people wearing HMDs to enter into a shared virtual world, seeing and interacting with each other.

GOAL:
The goal of this project is to develop a multisensory HMD system, investigate methods of manual control suited to a HMD, and demonstrate its usefulness in real applications.