The Ultimate Display (Head sight) Specs and Info…
Device: The Ultimate Display, (Head sight), (The Sword of Damocles)
Manufacturer: Morton Heilig
Announced Date: March 1968
Release Date: Never Released
Launch Price: Unknown
Device Type: AR HMD (PC Powered)
Display: X2 Minature CRT’s
Diagonal Field of View(FOV): 30°
Refresh Rate: 15 Hz
Weight: Unknown
CPU: N/A
GPU: N/A
Battery: N/A
Tracking: 3 DoF Non-positional (Gyroscope Based)
Controllers: N/A
Our Thoughts: The year is 1965 and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Leonov has become the first person to walk in space, Lyndon B. Johnson is the President of the United States and a man called Ivan E. Sutherland is about to invent the world’s fist head-mounted virtual reality display machine called “The Ultimate Display.” While many people consider this to be the true origins of VR the Sensorama machine was invented almost 10 years before this! But it wasn’t an HMD.
While it wasn’t called a virtual reality headset at the time it is best to finish in the words of Sutherland himself “The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal.”
Sources used…
- https://www.virtual-reality-shop.co.uk/the-sword-of-damocles-1968/
- http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.136.3720