I would say, what is also lacking are resolution, dynamic range, and latency. Regarding the latter, even if it's a closed circuit analog system with no digital buffering, there is still frame refresh to consider.
At night, if the display isn't dark enough, it will act as a light source, interfering with the driver's night vision. Black has to be black, and dark objects that would be visible with the naked eye via mirror had better be visible with the camera.
WRT to the light guns, I never quite really understood why you couldn't somehow simulate this with LCDs. Isn't the refresh rate on LCDs higher? So couldn't you work around that somehow? Obviously the answer is prob. not since no one (that I know of) has done it, but I was genuinely curious of what precisely the technical limitation is.
You'd be surprised. Getting good light reflection without also producing an image of the surroundings to conflict with the display is harder than it seems.
I thought the market would have made more progress by now.
I believe the reason is that there are a lot of patents/IP around the core technology, and it's owned by very few companies who essentially have a monopoly on the market. This also explains the secrecy surrounding the "low-level" details. As this article shows, you can definitely get more gray levels by driving the display directly.
Well said. If and when I can try it out before ordering, then I'll seriously consider it. I'm skeptical that a non-retinal display will ever been good enough for this kind of application.
I'd imagine applications even with a low res, blurry display might include directional indicators and notification lights in the periphery of the users vision. This would only require a ring of a few LEDs round the edge of the device and would be more discreet than e.g. glass.
Many displays made for this market have atrocious picture quality and no video processing features because their target customers don't care about them, they only care about brightness and longevity.
As for night vision, you mean when wearing vision enhancement optics? I did not fully understand you the first time, I thought you meant night vision as in 'night adapted eyes', where you'd lower the intensity as much as possible not to ruin your night vision. Not sure what the implications would be for electronically enhanced optics but if they use a display you could of course put the map straight on the display?
"... With only 7 colors and a refresh time of about a minute ..."
Ouch, even worse than expected. The project is interesting, but I'm totally unimpressed by these numbers; I wouldn't pay a premium for a sub par display that is slow as a dead sloth. A traditional LED screen plus some tricks to save power would make a much better picture frame IMO. I would for example use a PIR/microwave sensor (they're cheap!) to detect when someone is approaching or stationing near the picture frame to bring the CPU back from sleep and turn on the display and backlight. It would never reach the same almost zero current draw of a epaper screen, but the quality gain paired with the lower cost would probably make it a viable alternative.
Neither do most of the other common display technologies available to us!
EDIT: Can't reply to TeMPOraL, but I think that's not true, they need polarized light. I'm not an expert on this but my intuition is there are unrealized advances to be made in the field of reflective LCD-based displays. I just don't think there's much demand to research these applications and connect the dots. I would be surprised if you couldn't make a pretty decent, high refresh rate reflective display using an LCD based approach.
At night, if the display isn't dark enough, it will act as a light source, interfering with the driver's night vision. Black has to be black, and dark objects that would be visible with the naked eye via mirror had better be visible with the camera.
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