After seeing the cheap transparent OLED displays that have recently come on the market, you might have thought of using them to build a wearable display as an affordable way to build your own wearable display, for much less than the expensive commercial offerings. To save you the inevitable disappointment that would result from such a build, [Zach Freedman] took it upon himself to do so, and show why transparent wearable displays are a harder than it looks.
[Zach] built a headband with integrate microcontroller to hold the transparent rich over his eye. To the wearer, anything shown on the display would be practically invisible save for a slight glow, not just hard to read. Contrary to what many people might think, the hard part of wearable displays is not in the display itself, but rather the optics. The human eye is physically incapable of focusing on any object at that distance, [Zach] explains why this is the case in the video after the break and gives an excellent introduction to optics in the process. For a wearable display to work, all the light beams from the display need to be focused into your eyeball by lenses and or reflectors, without distorting your view of everything beyond the lens. This requires, lightweight and distortion-free collimators and beam splitters, which are expensive and hard to make.
While these transparent OLEDs might not make practical heads-up displays, they are still a cool part for projects like a volumetric display. It is certainly possible to build your own smart glasses or augmented reality glasses, ..
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