Project Obsidian – helmet or glasses?
In our survey, many of you expressed a desire to have a HUD in a helmet visor. We’d like to explain why it’s better for Project Obsidian to be glasses instead.
We’re not a helmet company.
We’re not in the business of making skydiving helmets. We never have been, and have no experience with creating a helmet. The latest generation of skydiving helmets now have safety certification, which we have even less experience with.
Even *if* we decided to create our own skydiving helmet with a HUD, the fact that it had a HUD in addition to trying to compete with the other helmets would make it cost a LOT more than other helmets. We’ll have to spend money on developing the helmet, certification, in addition to developing the HUD, and it is simply money we do not have. It would also take time and push back the release date by months, if not years. Then we’d have the usual issues of being a new helmet manufacturer trying to compete with established brands.
“Ask yourself, will you actually give up your current favourite helmet to buy yet another, more expensive helmet with a HUD?”
There are already great helmets in the skydiving market. Being skydivers ourselves, we have our favourites. Ask yourself, will you actually give up your current favourite helmet to buy yet another, more expensive helmet with a HUD?
Project Obsidian is NOT a simple projector.
Project Obsidian is not a simple projector. The optics system is extremely advanced – more akin to the fibre optics used in advanced spectrometers. If you can somehow use a cinema projector to project something on a visor, for example, we can guarantee that at a distance of about 2 inches from your face, nothing will be in focus.
This means that we need to tune optical performance to make the image clearly visible during skydiving. Unless we tightly integrate it with a custom helmet design, there is no way we can simply “plug-in” and place the image on any skydiving helmet visor.
Glasses can work.
We will be testing Project Obsidian with all the latest skydiving helmets to ensure that they fit properly even with tight padding. Don’t forget – we’re skydivers like you!
Glasses will mean that it will work with the most popular skydiving helmets, while catapulting your altitude awareness to an entirely new level.
In addition to actual testing in our DZ, we’ve bought the latest skydiving helmets to make sure they can fit.
We open our visors under canopy anyway.
As soon as we’re under canopy we lift our visors. Don’t you?
If the display was somehow in the visor this would pretty much remove it under canopy, arguably where altitude awareness is more important.
So we’ll be making Project Obsidian as a pair of glasses.
In our next post, we’ll look at the internals of Project Obsidian.