MyVu
Overview
MyVu was an American manufacturer of wearable near-eye video displays, active in the mid-to-late 2000s. Its products — the Personal Media Viewer line, including the Solo, Crystal and Universal editions — were video eyewear that presented a virtual screen at an apparent distance of several feet, intended chiefly for watching video from an iPod or similar portable player.
The company grew out of MicroOptical Corporation, founded by Mark Spitzer, which had worked on miniature display optics since the mid-1990s. MyVu ceased operations around 2010–11.
The Product
The design placed small LCD or OLED microdisplays with magnifying optics in a set of frames worn on the face, connected by cable to a battery pack and a video source. Reviews of the period were consistent: the concept was appealing, the image quality was acceptable rather than good, the resolution was low by any later standard, the devices were tethered and heavy on the nose, and — decisively — wearing them in public looked strange enough that most buyers did not.
Some models were see-through and some were fully occluding; the see-through versions were of interest to the wearable computing community as a relatively affordable head-mounted display, and MyVu units appear in a number of research and hobbyist rigs from the period.
Why It Is Worth an Entry
MyVu is a well-documented instance of a recurring pattern rather than an important product in itself.
The near-eye display has been reinvented roughly every decade since Ivan Sutherland's head-mounted display of 1968: the Private Eye used in Thad Starner's Lizzy, the Virtual Boy, MyVu and its contemporaries, Google Glass, and the current generation of mixed-reality headsets and display glasses. Each generation improves the optics substantially and encounters the same non-optical obstacles: weight and comfort over hours rather than minutes, battery and tethering, the difficulty of a display that is either occluding or washed out, and — most persistently — the social cost of wearing a camera or a screen on one's face in the presence of other people.
The technical problems have largely yielded. The social one has not, and MyVu is a useful reminder that it was already the binding constraint fifteen years before the current attempts.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
The near-eye display is the form factor that most directly tests where the boundary of acceptable augmentation currently sits, because it is worn on the face, is visible to others, and may or may not be recording. MyVu failed for reasons that were largely social rather than technical, which makes it a better case study than a success would be. Compare the Twiddler and Siftables: sound ideas that lost to incumbent form factors for reasons outside the specification.
