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"I realized there was a heavy-duty change coming in biology, and I could write a really compelling novel about catastrophic evolution, punctuated equilibrium."
- Greg Bear

Video-Glasses  
  Special light-gathering elements allowed the end user to see omni-directionally.  

She'd never realized it before, but each set cost as much as a small house.

They looked it, too-at close range they had the strange aura of scientific instruments. …a skin of tough black plastic, but packed tight with pricey superconductive circuitry. They had no real lenses in them - just thousands of bit-mapped light detectors. The raw output was a prismatic blur - visual software handled all the imagery, depth of focus, and so on. The operator, back at his screen, didn't have to depend on the user's gaze, though. With software he could examine anything in the entire field of vision.

Technovelgy from Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling.
Published by William Morrow in 1988
Additional resources -

You might also be interested in an SF in the News item called EyeBall: Omni-Directional Smart Eye Sensor for a story about a real-world device that can gather light from different directions; special software creates a nearly spherical picture.

Compare to magic spectacles from Pygmalion's Spectacles (1935) by Stanley G. Weinbaum, Tru-Vu Lenses from Earth (1990) by David Brin, spex (spexware) from Deep Eddy (1993), also by Sterling, data goggles from Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson,eyecaps from Starfish (1999) by Peter Watts, overlay specs from Halting State (2007) by Charles Stross and HUD glasses from Daemon (2009) by Daniel Suarez.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Islands in the Net
  More Ideas and Technology by Bruce Sterling
  Tech news articles related to Islands in the Net
  Tech news articles related to works by Bruce Sterling

Video-Glasses-related news articles:
  - 360Specs Virtual Reality Glasses From Smartphones
  - MetaPro Holographic Glasses For VR Like Iron Man

Articles related to Display
Augmented Reality Book Covers Reveal The Inner Book
TCL CSOT 17-Inch Printed OLED Scrolling Display
Looking Glass Display Good Enough For Science Fiction, Fantasy
LG Wing Twisting Smartphone Might Be Fun

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