Head-Mounted Displays: Many applications,
More than just optics

The Optical Society of San Diego and this evening's host, Bob Bergstedt, are pleased to present a talk by Jim Melzer of Kaiser Electro-Optics, entitled "Head-Mounted Displays: Many applications, More than just optics."    Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) are personal information-viewing devices mounted on the head that can provide information in a way that no other display can. While it can be used as a hands-off information source, it can also be made reactive to head and body movements, replicating the way we view, navigate and explore the world. This unique capability lends itself to applications such as Virtual Reality for creating artificial environments, to medical visualization as an aid in surgical procedures, to aircraft simulation and training, to fixed and rotary wing avionics. This talk will cover the fundamental parts of a head-mounted display (optics, image sources and head mounting), as well as some of the many unique applications for this technology.

Biography: Jim Melzer is a Product Manager for head-mounted displays at Kaiser Electro-Optics, in Carlsbad. He has extensive experience in optical and displays engineering, and is an expert in display design for head-mounted systems, aviation life-support, and user interface. He has authored over 25 technical papers, holds four patents in HMD design, and is co-author with Dr. Kirk Moffitt of Head-Mounted Displays, Designing for the User, published by McGraw-Hill.

OCTOBER 2000 MEETING REVIEW
by Gary Noyes

Bob Bergstedt introduced our speaker, Jim Melzer, from Kaiser Electro-Optics. Bob had worked with Jim in the past (in fact, I had worked with Jim at Hughes many years ago, prior to Jim's joining Kaiser). Jim is a Product Manager for head-mounted displays at Kaiser and his talk was a review of head-mounted displays and applications.

Jim's talk reviewed helmet-mounted displays, the optics and display sources involved, and their applications. The drive has been to lighter and smaller systems (these are mounted on a helmet!) with increased resolution and field of view. Jim had charts on some bizarre early HMDs. I especially liked the large-lensed one dubbed "the bug that ate Dayton" (with reference to Wright-Patterson AFB's location in Ohio)! Jim brought along a number of cardboard-and-plastic-lens visual aids for us to "play with" in getting a hands-on feel for some of the vision-related, human factors aspects of HMD system design.

Significant advances in optics and their manufacture have allowed a lot of the desired improvements to HMD systems: aspheric and decentered optics, plastics, diamond turning, precision molding. The use of LCDs, OMELs, and OLEDs instead of CRTs has allowed for much smaller and lighter systems, also.

Applications started with the military for data presentation to pilots. More recently, the commercial applications, with their manufacturing volume potentials, have really driven the technology. Applications such as training simulators and user-immersed design tools are becoming more and more commonplace. And we're all familiar with the virtual reality games.

Jim's presentation was very well received, with numerous questions during the talk and people meeting with him afterwards. Our thanks go out to him.