Headset: Looking Glass
Manufacturer: Polhemus Labs
Resolution: 4-to 8-foot fiber-optic cables, 500 X 500 TV line pairs
Weight: 0.88 lbs
Field of view: 40H, custom optics
Video in: NTSC or RGB
Cost: $35,000 (£25,666)
Launch Date: July 1995
Estimated Value: $8-10,000
Other Features: Requires interface to 200-300 foot-lamberts image sources (very bright). Lowest-weight HMD built so far.
Polhemus Labs is not related to Polhemus Inc. (though they were started by the same person). Sadly, not a whole lot is known about this HMD, but at the time the company was way more interested in the positional tracking technology than VR itself, but the headset was made into a working prototype. At the same time they were evaluating magnetic field, inertial, and hybrid systems in the laboratory.
One of the virtual environments they use to study complex behaviour was a driving simulator. The simulator was based on a racing go-kart frame in which the steering column was installed with a low-noise rotary potentiometer and the accelerator and brake pedals are instrumented with linear potentiometers to make the simulation feel more real.