Maf’j found it difficult to merge the live and recorded views using the crude mirrorless Quizzer. This made me aware that I have trained my eyes and brain to be fast at binocular merging and to ignore large physical objects up close, becoming an expert without realising it.
This prompted me to work on improvements to the Quizzer itself. I had noticed that when using the Quizzer without the mirror prism so that the phone’s camera can look forward, the body of the phone itself gets in the way of the binocular overlap. I decided to redesign the quizzer to optimise the overlap.
Ideas I had included: finding lenses that focus nearer to the screen so the other eye can see around the phone more easily, putting another prism onto the phone camera so that it in effect looks forward when the body of the phone is at 90 degrees to the user’s eye, and finally to have two mirror prisms reflecting the screen like a periscope so that the viewer can look above or out to the side of the phone.
Settling on the periscope idea, I sourced some larger prisms so I could reflect more of the screen for a larger field of view. I found it difficult to hold the prisms and lenses together in order to find the focal distance and to test the width of the overlap and the distance the lens should be from the screen, so I made a holder out of foam.
