CompuServe Messages

John, most of the autofocus things you mention are either I/R or sonic based. Their sampling frequency is low (to keep cost down) and you sometimes fake them out with motion. Response times are usually measured in terms of seconds. Your idea is great. But it also has significant technical challanges. Your X-Specs wearer will undoubtedly move his head. Therefore, tracking the head to hand distance/position is critical with a complex or dense object (i.e lots o points). I'm sure there must be some other way to do it, but on all the systems I've worked on, there were either gyros and accelerometers to get angular and linear acceleration readings that are double integrated and filtered along the way to get accurate and timely (like 20 – 40 msec) position updates. Admittedly these systems had stricter requirements (trying to put something the size of a house at a position +/- 20 meters of an exact postion in space 300 miles above the earth) but the problem is not terribly different. It is more complicated since your hand will be undergoing unknown trajectories to unknown positions instead of flying a predetrmined path to a predetermined point. Basically you problem is star wars – trying to knock out multiple warheads undergoing evasive manuevers using a launcher that is not stationary. It's a non-trivial progblem. However, you may want to approach NASA with it. It would have a great application for earth-bound training for zero-G construction, etc. They might be willing to put some grant money out to study the problem and come up with some possible design approaches. Course they'd probably opt for some holographic display instead of a monitor!! wmc