eyephone

English edit

Etymology edit

From eye +‎ phone. Compare earphone.

Pronunciation edit

Homophone: iPhone

Noun edit

eyephone (plural eyephones)

(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 […]