Ever dreamt of having eyes in the back of your head? It seems a daft question, but not until you get your eyes on this from a team of French engineers. It’s called ‘FlyVIZ’ and it lets the wearer experience a 360-degree vision of their surroundings, in real-time no less, with the aid of a head-mounted display (HMD).

It might not be the subtlest of headwear at this stage of development, perhaps, but nevertheless FlyVIZ is a fascinating piece of kit. Combining a camera able to capture panoramic images (or a ‘panoramic image acquisition system’ as described by the team behind it), the FlyVIZ then uses a computer and a ‘vision algorithm’ too complicated for us to understand to transform the 360-degree, ‘fly-eye’ visual information into an image mapped to the dimensions of the HMD field-of-view. Where the human field of view (FoV) is limited to around 180-degrees horizontally, the 360-degree view the FlyVIZ delivers – albeit at the cost of reducing the vertical field of view somewhat – looks fantastic. While still in pre-production, the concept at least is proven. We fear 180-degree view will never look the same way again. 

Harvey McDaniel

Source: Irisa.fr