First-generation Interactive Headsets - Text 1
While Gernsback, McCollum, Heilig and others were conceiving essentially passive television eyeglasses – a simple stereoscopic television worn on the head like a mask – others were already seeking to introduce the first form of interactivity into immersive viewing systems which would modify the image (the frame and the field of view) in accordance with movements of the user’s head, thereby joining kinaesthetic immersion with spatial immersion.
In 1961, William F. Bradley, an electrical engineer working at the radio and television manufacturer Philco, filed a patent application for a “remotely controlled remote viewing system.”[1] This system made it possible to control a camera from a distance by means of movements of the head. The headset, which resembled a football helmet but which was more like what American air force pilots wore at the time, was connected remotely with a video camera so that movements of the head in the three degrees of freedom, on the x, y and z axes, were measured and reproduced in a similar device which determined the camera’s movements.
The “coupling” of the head and the camera could be carried out in two ways: electro-mechanically, by means of an articulated metallic structure attached to the headset and incorporating three angle sensors (“angle-sensing means,” a potentiometer or synchro-transmitter) (fig. 4 of the patent application); or electro-magnetically, by installing on the headset two “sensing coils” and, in the room in which the user was located, a “reference structure” with three pairs of “induction coils” attached to the walls, the ceiling and the floor (figs. 12 and 13 of the patent application). The camera, for its part, was mounted on a universal joint suspension with three articulated arcs (“gimbal sections”), three synchro-receivers and three motors, which made rotations on three axes possible (figs. 7, 8 and 9 of the patent application).
