From: "Liquid Image Corp." Subject: Re: HUMAN-FACTORS: A real, customer conceived VR app Date: 22 Oct 1996 23:21:09 GMT Message-ID: <01bbc06f$9312b440$96a870cc@merlin.magic.mb.ca> Organization: News readers of the Fluxland Peter Rothman wrote in response to Niels Hilbrink's article > I was simply saying that more HMDs are *currently* sold for TV use > than for gaming. How can you make this statement! You may have inside information on one companies sales figures but I doubt that you have them for the whole head mounted display industry. <...> > VIO makes and markets two versions of their HMD here in the US; one > which takes NTSC video as input only and the other which comes with a > VGA to NTSC converter. Both units have resolutions that are closer to > TV quality than to common computer displays. The TV-only unit costs > less, and can be used for video games as well. Which one sells more > volume? Is this the basis for the market estimate above? Could it be that people are buying the HMD's to have a "look see" at what VR is like? Or, that they are buying the cheapest one because the tracker option is not a valued addition by the customer due to limited game support? Or that the higher resolution between the VTV and the i-glasses are not worth the additional $$$ required to purchase the HMD - which supports the argument that this market is motivated primarily on price and not so much on resolution. > Unless you know something I don't, you can't produce HDTV signals with > a PC without special and fairly expensive equipment. Why would VIO > produce an HDTV unit first (which is not useful for computer display) > unless that's their primary market? Yes they probably will produce a > high res computer display, but my point is where is the emphasis? > Why do you need to produce HDTV signals from your PC - the HMD should handle all signal conversion and aspect ratio correction (4:3(VGA) ->16:9(HDTV)) internally. It seems to me that they are producing the HDTV product in response to the demand that they have received from the market for a high resolution HMD. I would even go out on a limb to say that if the best screen in the world today was NOT the HDTV format screen that VIO is using (planning to use) that they would have gone with a 4:3 screen instead. Using the acronym HDTV is also incorrect as the panel supports the HDTV display mode 16:9 but was designed to be used as part of a triad in a projection system. Therefore the display format is HDTV, yet, the resolution is ~1/3 HDTV at best. > A good application for a computer compatible head mounted display is > portable computing. A decent 640x480 display selling for a price > similar to a monitor might be popular in this market. Corporations > like FedEX, PG&E, UPS, etc. all have large numbers of portable devices > in the field. But this is a relatively small niche compared with the > number of televisions out there. Most American homes have more than > one television, but very few have more than one computer or game > system. How many Americans have laptops or PDAs? A company segments a market into niche areas in order to focus product development and marketing efforts towards that niche. Why? So that the company can capture most, if not all, of the niche. In the case of FedEx, UPS, etc... you are correct, they have a large number of portable devices in the field and are prime candidates for HMD's. In comparison to the American TV market they seem small - granted. But if you were to take the professional portable market - FedEx, UPS, PG&E, etc... and assume a 75% market penetration which is not unheard of in niche marketing, and the American TV market and assume a 1/4% market penetration which would be phenomenal given the status of the TV market and the two totals look pretty close. Also, in this case, I believe that the laptop and PDA figures are not relevant as we are comparing the consumer TV market to the niche portable market. > Also its important to keep in mind that many of these devices are sold > overseas and in particular in the far east. "many" of these devices have not been sold anywhere - "some" may be a more appropriate word. Tony