Hacking the MyVu

myvu_3d

[Conundrum] shares with us his MyVu hacking experiences. The MyVu personal display seems like it would be a great foundation to build some decent 3d display goggles, it is fairly small and has a screen for each eye. This opens up the door to possibly driving them independently for 3d. Those giant helmets we used to use were not anywhere near as stylish as these. Apparently, some quick hacking can double your resolution or even possibly supply 3D imagery! The details are pretty sparse, but it appears as though he has gotten some of these mods functional and tested. Lets hope he posts some more information, we’re definitely interested. We normally wouldn’t post something with so little information, but we’re hoping this encourages him to give us more.

[thanks andre]

Comments [16]

Reader Comments

Years ago, there used to be a scanning LED HUD-type display that mounted on the arm of a pair of glasses. It was VGA resolution, 16 red scale, and supposedly looked like a 60″ screen at 5 feet.

I never saw a pair in real life, but they weren’t *that* expensive, and they never seemed to catch on. I wonder why.

–jc

Posted at 10:51 am on Jan 1st, 2009 by jcwren

this instructable has a similar sort of hack, though I’d want the driver and batteries in a belt pouch (if that’s even possible with current kit), as it’s a bit bulky to head-mount on its own.

Maybe the driver boards could be mounted at the back?…

*ponders*

Posted at 11:14 am on Jan 1st, 2009 by herbicide

Hmm. From what I can see on the product page, it would appear that they are displaying the same image for both eyes because there’s only one video input. To get true 3d, you would need some way to get independent video feeds to each eye. Seems like it would be complicated at best and expensive at the worst. Would you need two controllers to process the video image for each eye? If so, that would mean your initial cost just to get started is $200 minimum since you’d have to buy 2 pair just to get two of the controllers…

Posted at 12:07 pm on Jan 1st, 2009 by signal7

Wow, a politician and a spammer.

Posted at 12:09 pm on Jan 1st, 2009 by crizo

Thanks John, can we post off-topic crap on your site too?

Posted at 1:02 pm on Jan 1st, 2009 by Luddite

it’s tough to decipher what he actually did. he describes several different methods, and then says that they wont work. the claim of doubling the resolution seems to be nonsense. the display only has a fixed number of pixels. what seems to be done is like flicker glasses. the backlight of each lcd is turned off in an alternating fashion at each frame. each frame is rendered from a corresponding perspective. perceived frame rate is 1/2, and will flicker a bit, but i think it could work rather well.

Posted at 2:40 pm on Jan 1st, 2009 by charlie

@charlie: agreed on all counts. Doubling the resolution is not just nonsense, it is literally impossible, at least as far as hacking goes. I suppose it might be possible to smt in new video driver chips, attach new lcds, etc…but now you are building a whole new unit not hacking.

Don’t bother clicking link to read info or look at pics…the images literally show *nothing* of interest. If I had one of these units I could pull it apart, solder some wires on exposed pads and have the same pics posted in 5 minutes. The info is vague and unhelpful.

Posted at 4:42 pm on Jan 1st, 2009 by fractalrock

“We normally wouldn’t post something with so little information, but we’re hoping this encourages him to give us more.”

a policy better kept to in the future…this was drivel. My daughters are 11 and they gutted my old glasstron last year…pics of that would have been about as useful as this was….certainly would have been a more impressive write up.

How about you just delete the whole thing while we all look the other way….we can all pretend this never happened LOL

Posted at 12:32 am on Jan 2nd, 2009 by Techartisan

Um, actually you *can* increase the horizontal resolution under certain conditions. the caveat is that it is monochrome only (G/RB) however this could be useful for reading text on the move.

Sorry about the vague information, I am currently trying to upload more useful pictures including one of the actual LED board I used, have a look.

-A

Posted at 3:26 am on Jan 2nd, 2009 by andre

I would love to get this working with a virtual boy emulator.

Posted at 3:00 pm on Jan 2nd, 2009 by Dave

@ #1

Are you talking about the Private Eye P4? I own one, it does 80 col red text but I heard there is a win3.1 driver out there somewhere. I haven’t used it in years because it has an ISA based controller card. IIRC the thing used a single row of strobed LEDs and a mirror that scans to make a full display.

Posted at 12:20 am on Jan 3rd, 2009 by Dax

interesting idea. I am also looking into doing another 3D mod using tricolour LED’s on each side…

will let you know when done.
-A

Posted at 10:29 am on Jan 3rd, 2009 by andre

Amazing Site I like it. It Was Quite Interesting NiceWork I appreciate the information you provided. Good day

Posted at 5:43 am on Jan 7th, 2009 by shams.pri

not sure if its relevant, but I just got a pair of the myvu crystal glasses, and there are two separate wires running from the connector to the controller all the way up to either side of the glasses. if I pull half of the connector out, I can get the display on that side to go black, so they might be driven independently

Posted at 12:34 pm on Apr 7th, 2009 by bondi

its also possible to initialise the displays then disconnect the drives only and send clock synced information to the two panels (use a 4016/4066 quad bilateral switch) that gets around the lack of a datasheet. it appears that the drive system is similar to the Sony camcorder screens.

-A

Posted at 3:56 pm on Jun 20th, 2009 by andre

andre, what is the “external video hack” you mention?

Posted at 10:36 am on Nov 3rd, 2009 by bondi

Hacking the MyVu

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