• Cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are a fascinating display technology that has been largely abandoned outside of retro gaming and a few other niche uses. • They use magnets to steer a beam of electrons rapidly across a screen, and while a marvel of engineering for their time, their expense, complexity, and weight all led to them being largely replaced by other displays like LCDs and LEDs. • They were also difficult to miniaturize, but there were a few companies who tried. • [dooglehead] located a few of the smallest CRT displays he could find and got to work putting them in the most unlikely of situations:a virtual reality headset. • The two displays for his headset come from Sony Watchmans, compact over-the-air black-and-white handheld televisions from the late 1900s. • [dooglehead] had to create a method for sending video to these units which originally had no input connections, and then also used an FPGA to split a video signal into two parts, with one for each display.
Article Summaries:
- Cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are a fascinating display technology that has been largely abandoned outside of retro gaming and a few other niche uses. They use magnets to steer a beam of electrons rapidly across a screen, and while a marvel of engineering for their time, their expense, complexity, and weight all led to them being largely replaced by other displays like LCDs and LEDs. They were also difficult to miniaturize, but there were a few companies who tried. [dooglehead] located a few of the smallest CRT displays he could find and got to work putting them in the most unlikely of situations:
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