[Freddy]

Thought this was interesting - new to me.

Hugo Gernsback's 1963 television eyeglasses anticipated virtual reality.

This oft-seen wonderfully weird photo depicts Hugo Gernsback wearing his "teleyeglasses" in 1963.

Short Article Here : http://boingboing.net/2016/12/05/hugo-gernsbacks-1963-televis.html

[Art]

Nice find! Yeah those glasses might have been the real deal but something tells me that any 3D content would have been severely lacking. 

[Korrelan]

Must have just been a mock up?

I'm pretty sure they didn't have CRT's that small back then... did they? Nah! can't have.

Cool piccie though.

 

[Freddy]

Dunno, would have to do some digging.

It was only to show that the idea has been around a while really.

[Art]

It and a subsequent article detailed it as follows:

But his most arresting invention was probably his television eyeglasses [above]. A Life magazine profile of Gernsback in July 1963, when he was 78, described his “teleyeglasses”:

    He now invents only in broad outline, leaving the actual mechanics of the thing to others. His television eyeglasses—a device for which he feels millions yearn—constitute a case in point. When the idea for this handy, pocket-size portable TV set occurred to him in 1936, he was forced to dismiss it as impractical. But a few weeks ago, feeling that the electronics industry was catching up with his New Deal-era concepts, he orders some of his employees to build a mock-up.

The teleyeglasses weighed about 140 grams and were built around small cathode-ray tubes that ran on low-voltage current from tiny batteries. (The user faced no danger of being electrocuted, Gernsback promised.) Because there was a separate screen for each eye, it could display stereoscopic images—much like today’s 3D virtual-reality glasses. Noting the massive V-type antenna protruding from the teleyeglasses, Life described the effect as “neo-Martian.” To be fair, modern VR goggles are only slightly less geeky looking than Gernsback’s.