eyephone

English

Etymology

From eye +‎ phone. Compare earphone.

Pronunciation

• Homophone: iPhone

Noun

eyephone (plural eyephones)

1. (sometimes science fiction) A device that allows the wearer to watch video material as if immersed in the world being shown.
   • 1979, Science digest: Volume 86, Issue 2

     One system in the works in this country would have us wearing "eyephones," a helmet-like apparatus with a small TV screen […] With the eyephones, each eye will receive only one field, but filters will adjust the picture.

   • 1993, Diane M. Gayeski, Multimedia for Learning: Development, Application, Evaluation, page 82:

     Further along on the "naturalness of use" continuum are today's working VR projects where users are tethered by devices such as eyephones and datagloves.

   • 1997, Dafydd Gibbon, Roger Moore, Richard Winski, Spoken Language Characterisation (page 185)

     State-of-the-art eyephones (head mounted visual displays) are not considered to be suitable for providing a realistic or natural visual environment.

   • 1998, Richard Gough, Ric Allsopp, Claire MacDonald, On Tourism (page 12)

     The key element in this group of technologies is 'automatic head position tracking', which allows the wearer of an eyephone to scan a computer-generated landscape in a quasi-natural way.

   • 1999, William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

     He locked the door, put the CLOSED sign up, and went into the back room where he found the boy still seated, cross-legged, as he'd left him, his face hidden by the massive old eyephones cabled to the open notebook in his lap.

   • 2008, Thomas Quealy, Is That You?, page 87:

     “That apparatus you see on his head is an eyephone. Inside it are tiny video screens that are transmitting to its wearer images of an opponent on the other end […]