Chapter 28 - All HUD Scenes from Iron Man (Patreon)

Initially, I had planned on only using the augmented reality HUD display while the armor's helmet was up and deployed, Iron Man-style, in other words during active combat, but that was very limiting as I couldn’t exactly go around with my helmet deployed. The Starfleet folks were already freaked out enough as it was by my armor. A far superior method, in my opinion, would be using a direct neural interface, using the technology in my ship’s neural interface helmet, to show the HUD output.

It really wouldn't be all that hard to augment reality via direct mental connection without the helmet being up. The underlying tech to directly display an image via the optic nerves wasn't even all that advanced in this time, though doing without a visibly worn device would be harder. That addictive game that had nearly taken over the Enterprise in TNG had shown that it wasn't that hard to add a visual layer over what the eyes could see with a mental control component, but was not actually visible in reality. In this case, the connection would ideally need to go both ways. My armor’s sensor output would be sent to and displayed as if truly in my visual field, overlain on reality. While my onboard computer/sensors would also be taking into account what my eyes could see, running it through a database or running a calculation of some sort, and then outputting it back over my visual field to assist me or give me additional information. Yeah, maybe it was a bit more advanced than that game, but the underlying principles were fundamentally the same.