in•no•va•tion n. 1. The act of introducing something new.
Taking risks can lead to tremendous loss or glorious reward. Risk takers can be found in Las Vegas at casinos, up in the sky jumping out of airplanes, and pretty much everywhere else where results are uncertain. You rarely find risk takers in the hardware world these days, not after companies like Rambus have put it all on the line and come up largely defeated. And yet, every time a company does take some kind of risk, it attracts levels of attention the likes of which are not typically seen, ensuring that the end result is well documented and later scrutinized if necessary.

It is likely because of this reason a company called eMagin caught our eye at the Electronic Entertainment Expo this year. What eMagin had on display wasn’t anything we would call new from a conceptual standpoint, rather, it was a product based off a decades-old idea, infused with the some of the very latest technology. We all remember when we were young, walking through the mall with our parents and stopping at an arcade because it had something called “Virtual Reality”: a weird space pod looking thing whose occupants had on a clunky looking visor and wielded an impressive-looking laser blaster. While wearing the ten pound device on your head was uncomfortable at best, the experience the whole system afforded its users was pretty spectacular.

What eMagin has done, in the simplest possible explanation; they have taken this experience and every apparatus necessary to make it happen and wrapped it up in a well-designed, easy to use, and lightweight package. Their Z800 3DVisor was introduced in 2005 and is already being hailed as the world’s best head mounted display (HMD). So what makes the Z800 3DVisor from eMagin so amazing? What advantages could wearing a monitor on your head possibly render for the hardcore gamer?