Helmets are great. They protect us from accidental harm while biking with feet or motor, they occasionally let us look cool and they block harmful UV rays from mixing in with our eyeballs. They have one drawback. They tend to restrict our field of vision. Let us put it this way. You wouldn’t wear a helmet if a scary dude was chasing you down the street in the middle of the night. You’d have no idea if you outran him or if he was creeping up ever-so-slightly to do whatever it is scary dudes do! Luckily, there is a new helmet concept being fiddled with that will keep every scary dude in constant sight. Phew.
The FlyVIZ headset concept finally allows us to wear a helmet and maintain a constant 360 degrees field of vision. Nothing will sneak up on us now. Not motorists, pies or even errant mutts. The idea is fairly simple. The creators went in and tinkered with the already existing Sony Personal 3D Viewer. This device was modified to play back a live feed from a panoramic camera mounted on top the user’s head. Software on a laptop acts as an intermediary, reformatting the 360-degree image to remove distortion and compress it to fit into what human’s are used to seeing. It takes some getting used, the creators say around fifteen minutes, but after a while it almost seems, gasp, natural.
This is again, just a working concept for now. We are sure the creators may let the rest of us in on how to build one before long, however. Until that day, check out this video of this wonder-helmet being used to help the wearer dodge balls! That’s another use, owning at dodge ball. Somebody call up Ben Stiller.
