Heads-up display for performers

Concept for augmented reality mobile phone,
originally uploaded by Leonard Low.

Yesterday, as sometimes happens, I sang a solo at church. It went pretty well, partly because I am one of the two or three people in the group who does not much suffer from the number one phobia: public performance. I think I got rid of this particular fear back when I was teaching college and got used to all those ravenous (or sometimes sleepy) eyes looking at me all at once.

Consider a visor like the one shown here, maybe slightly reduced in size to something like the thing Bono wears onstage, with the half-reflective properties of a heads-up display. If you adjust the lighting at the venue and the contrast of the display you could effectively blot out the sight of those threatening eyes. One could replace it with something calming or useful (such as the words of the psalm you are singing, often a tough thing for me to read given my recent turn toward farsightedness). Or, if you wanted more of a mood enhancer, you could just have a scene which enhances the emotional delivery of what you are singing or saying - for instance, if you were singing the beginning of The Sound of Music you could have a projection of the Austrian Alps spinning around. You could either keep your little technological hallucination to yourself, or you might choose to project it on a screen behind you simultaneously. It might work for some people to distract them from the audience they fear.