I remember being in a Sharper Image store in Miami many years ago, and one of the products in the store was a gizmo that looked sort of like a very large pair of sunglasses. Inside were tiny TV screens, one for each eye, and they were arranged in such a way that the brain could coherently combine the two images to make a single picture.
Pretty advanced technology for 1995, I would think, and the price tag reflected it (around $750, IIRC).
Has the technology advanced that this thing would now be affordable? Does any company make it? And what would such a thing be called?
If it’s an SAT x:y analogy we’re looking for, headphones are analogous to things like viewports, eyepieces, or viewfinder visors, such as used on TV cameras. The headphone is made so only one person can hear it; the viewport so only one person can see it.
Of course, you don’t wear the viewport. The most precise analogy would be to virtual reality goggles, but they’re nowhere near as common as headphones, and don’t have nearly so many applications.
If by headphones you mean stereo headphones then the correct answer would be a stereo viewer. That allows for 3 dimensional viewing of images.
I’ve made stereo views using digital cameras and it’s many times easier than using film cameras. All the cropping, pasting and printing are done on the computer.
FWIW, headmounted displays have never really taken off because they end up causing headaches and nausea after prolonged use. Human eyes have two different focusing mechanisms, accomodation & Vergence. With HMDs, the two signals no longer agree with each other which causes the brain to continually try and refocus as the two cues battle it out.
