Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Image superposition by optical means – Operator body-mounted heads-up display
Reexamination Certificate
2001-06-28
2002-09-03
Shalwala, Bipin (Department: 2673)
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Image superposition by optical means
Operator body-mounted heads-up display
C345S156000, C345S157000, C345S158000, C345S215000, C345S215000, C345S215000, C463S034000, C708S131000, C708S141000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06445364
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The invention relates to human/computer interfaces to visual data and more particularly to systems that must display a larger amount of visual data than may be conveniently displayed in a single conventional computer monitor. The present invention uses virtual reality techniques to provide instantaneous and intuitive access to large fields of visual data, and to provide visually-impaired users with enhanced access to enlarged visual data.
DESCRIPTION OF PRIOR ART
Among the visually-impaired population, the most common approach to computer access is specialized software. and/or hardware that enlarges the image displayed on the computer monitor. This is because simpler solutions such as moving closer to the monitor, using a larger monitor, adding an optical screen magnifier, or using a spectacle-mounted telescopic system provide either limited magnification or a very limited viewing field. Examples of commercially-available screen enlargers include LP-DOS by Optelec (Westford, Mass.), Zoomtext by Ai Squared (Manchester Center, Vt.), MAGic by Microsystems Software (Framingham, Mass.), and Magnum by Arctic Technologies (Troy, Mich.). In addition, simplistic screen enlargement modules are included in both the Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems.
These conventional computer display magnification solutions operate by magnifying the original image of a software application's output to a “virtual page” whose size is much larger than the physical monitor. For example, with a magnification of 10, a standard 8.5″×11″ page would be approximately 7 feet wide by 9 feet tall. The visually-impaired user then operates the computer by using a mouse, joystick, or cursor keys to control which portion of the virtual page is shown on the monitor at any given point in time. Since the monitor is fixed, the user is in essence moving the virtual page across the monitor, in a manner analogous to that used in closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems for magnifying book pages.
In most cases, conventional screen magnification is performed completely in software running on the host computer's central processing unit (CPU). While this provides a very low-cost solution, the data to be shown on the display must be rendered in its entirety whenever the user pans to a new location within the enlarged image. This can result in lags between commanding the computer to pan and seeing the new image. To overcome this problem, the entire virtual image can be rendered and stored in a video display buffer. Then, as the user selects a portion of the image for viewing, the required portion of the data can be quickly read out of the display buffer and sent to the display device. An example of such a hardware-accelerated screen magnifier is the Vista by Telesensory, Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.). This technique is a form of hardware acceleration known as image deflection.
Unfortunately, there are two basic shortcomings to the conventional approach, even with hardware acceleration. The first problem is spatial orientation, in that it is difficult to determine where on the page one's view is directed at any given time. This occurs because the monitor does not move, and there are no other visual cues to indicate where on the virtual page one's line of sight is facing. This spatial orientation problem is exacerbated for high magnifications and for portable systems employing small display monitors. For example, one study (Goodrich, et. al.) found mean magnifications of 15.48×for nearly 100 experienced users of closed-circuit television devices. At 15×, a 15″ monitor can only display about 1% of a standard 8.5″×11″ page, making most computer work essentially impossible for such users. The problem is further exacerbated by the emergence of graphically-intensive computing regimes such as Microsoft Windows and the Internet World Wide Web, where individual graphic elements may be magnified to become larger than an instantaneous viewing window, or may be automatically generated outside of the user's instantaneous viewing window without the user's awareness.
The second fundamental problem in the conventional approach is dynamic control, in that all of the various control schemes for navigating about the page are cumbersome, confusing, and slow. This is because the navigation methods are unintuitive, relying on such logic as “use joystick to move cursor around screen, and when cursor reaches the edge of the screen, the next portion of document in that direction will be displayed.” Alternatively, some screen enlargers maintain the cursor at the center of the screen, and require the user to position a desired insertion point over the cursor by moving the entire virtual page with a mouse or joystick. In all cases, dynamic control is not only unintuitive, but requires use of at least one hand, which negatively impacts productivity, and may make use by physically-impaired users difficult or impossible.
Together, these spatial orientation and dynamic control problems were termed the “field navigation” problem in the National Advisory Eye Council's 1994-98 National Plan (Legge, et. al.), in which the Low Vision and its Rehabilitation Panel identified this area as a particularly promising opportunity for new technologies.
One promising new technology that is now maturing is virtual reality, which is typically defined as a computer-generated three-dimensional environment providing the ability to navigate about the environment, turn one's head to look around the environment, and interact with simulated objects in the environment using a control peripheral.
In a virtual reality system, the user is “immersed” in a synthetic environment, in which virtual objects can be located anywhere in the user's physical space. The user views these objects by wearing a head-mounted display (HMD), which uses an optical system to cause a tiny display source such as a cathode ray tube or liquid crystal display to appear as a large display screen several feet in front of the user. Since the display source (or sources in the case of two eyes) is fixed to the user's head, the display is viewable regardless of where the user points his line-of-sight. The user also wears a head-tracker, which senses the direction the user is facing, and sends this information to the host computer. The computer uses this data to generate graphics corresponding to the user's line of sight in the virtual environment. This approach to human/computer interfaces was first conceived by Ivan Sutherland in 1966 for use in military simulators, and was first commercialized in the form of the Eyephone head-mounted display by VPL Research in the late 1980s.
Prior art in this area includes a wide range of relevant patents describing low-vision aids, improved virtual reality systems and components such as HMDs and head-trackers, but none which embody or anticipate the present invention.
In the field of low-vision aids, U.S. Pat. No. 4,227,209 issued Oct. 10, 1980 discloses an electronic sensory aid for visually-impaired users including an image sensor and a display array, wherein the degree of magnification provided in the display array may be adjusted by changing the number of display elements corresponding to each sensor array element. For use in electronic sensory aid applications requiring a large depth of focus, an improved image capture approach is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,325,123 issued Jun. 28, 1994, in which the imaging camera includes an opaque stop with a small aperture, thus allowing the magnification to be adjusted by moving the camera towards or away from the object to be magnified. A non-electronic sensory aid is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,548,485 issued Oct. 22, 1985, in which an XY stage is used to move textual material across an optical viewing system that captures a portion of the textual material for enlargement.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,125,046 issued Jun. 23, 1992, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,267,331 issued Nov. 30, 1993, an improved imagin
Lewis David L
Perkins Coie LLP
Shalwala Bipin
Vega Vista, Inc.
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