this is what I've been up to for the last two years...

This is the other device that we were working on at Inviso over the last two years. They're called eShades.

Basically these guys integrate our already tiny 800x600 SVGA displays (shrunken a little bit more) and puts 'em into this lightweight plastic frame. The glasses then connect up to a little box of tricks, which in turn plugs straight into the VGA port of your laptop or PC.

Laptops was mainly the intended market, as they were seen primarily as a "Road Warrior" product - for the travelling buisnessman. With them you could work in complete privacy while travelling (did you know 40% of all industrial espionage is done on planes looking over the shoulder of a person at there laptop?) You could watch DVDs. And the laptop battery life is doubled since you can turn off the laptop LCD display and just use the galsses (which are ultra low power).

My involvement with eShades was towards the end of that project. It turned out that one of our more brilliant engineers (a groovy ex-Apple guy) had at some point during the project's lifetime, accidentally (on-purpose) added a few registers here and a few transistors there...

...and it just so happened that these little tweaks let you use the eShades as full-on, stereoscopic 3d glasses.

What does that mean? Well, basically if you're playing a 3d game like Quake or Half-Life or whatever, you can actually view everything in true 3D. That means big scary crap coming out of the screen at you, 3D. None of these LCD shutter glass affairs where you see ghosting on the screen and the room around you. Nope - each eye sees it's own display with no cross-over - and it's so immersive that it's brown-trousers time if you're playing half-life and someone sneaks up behind you...

Needless to say I volunteered to work on this project right away. I did a couple of software dirty fixes to try and get content displaying on them the way we wanted to. And then as luck would have it, the nice chaps at nVidia came up with a driver that put out the perfect 3d signal for our glasses to gobble up ... A tweak or two later and Quake Arena never looked so intense.

Hey - doesn't an Xbox have an nVidia chip in it? ....

Sadly that where this story ends because Inviso ran out of cash in October and ceased operations. We're now busy shopping around the technology to see who'll buy all our hard work for a song. Oi, Gatesy! Gis us a job, eh?

In fact, the only bright spark of this story is that I've been in charge of controlling all the equipment so I've still got a pair of 3d eShades to play with. If you're into multiplayer games like Quake or "R.T.C. Wolfenstein" and you come across a player called "The Great Gonzo" who kind of happily gazes off in all directions for a while and then proceeds to rip you a new one - it means I'm wearing 'em and I literally can see round corners >:)

Now take a look at the eCase page if you haven't already, to see my other Inviso project.

Or if it's of interest, you can download the eShades Product Data Sheet, which is in Adobe Acrobat .pdf format. Doesn't include the 3D specs cos that was a) too new and was b) top secret but the rest is there.