SA Photonics is one of the suppliers of very high quality head mounted displays – with monocular and binocular, see through and occlusive types. They offer some of the best image quality using OLEDs and great optics – but they are expensive. Nevertheless, there remains a dedicated customer base for these products.
At I/ITSEC 2015, the company was showing off three new devices compared to last year’s event. The SA-92/S is a 92-degree diagonal FOV device with a horizontal FOV of about 78-degrees. Since it is built with two optical modules with 53-degree horizontal FOV, the overlap is only about 20 degrees with 29 degrees on each side showing only left or right eye data.
When I tried on this headset, I found that there are a lot of adjustments to make sure the headset is tight, comfortable and properly positioned in front of my eyes, including the overlap region. However, the image is extremely wide covering nearly my full field of view. It is also plenty bright, but with all AR displays, it is easy to confuse the virtual image with the background. This headset is designed to show symbology so having a neutral background really helps to see the data clearly. Such symbology is also not presented in 3D, so it is a flat plane of information. SA Photonics suggested I focus at infinity to view the content, but I found that hard to do and needed to refocus closer in to see the content properly.
Each HMD can also be head tracked to provide a 360-degree field of regard.
The second device, the SA-62, comes in a monocular see-thru version (SA-62/H), binocular see-thru version (SA-62/S) or binocular occlusive version (SA-62). This uses the same optical module with a 62-degree diagonal FOV / 53-degree horizontal FOV based upon a 1920×1200 OLED microdisplay. The binocular versions are 100% overlapped and can show some very nice 3D images. In the demo that I had, the colors looked significantly different in the OLED HMD compared to the LCD monitor. Apparently, SA Photonics is still working on adjusting the colors in the HDM, but they have very nice contrast (1000:1). The eye box is speced a 10 mm with a 25 mm eye relief, which seemed to be sufficient. The IPD is adjustable on the binocular models.
SA Photonics also showcased a mobile phone device for military users. Apparently, land warriors are using their phones for targeting and navigation in the field. The phones are mounted on their chests so they have to look down to see them. There is a concern that this make them more vulnerable as their eye are not up. The solution? Use one of the monocular eyepieces to couple to the smartphone and mount the eye piece on the helmet for eyes-up use. The photos below show the components of the solution (phone, battery pack, HMD diver and viewer) and the view of the symbology thru the eyepiece.
