Google Glass, Pi-style
The good people at Adafruit have a new tutorial up on making a wearable display, powered by a Pi, that clips on to your regular glasses or (if you’re a Terminator with perfect vision) sunglasses.
The composite display from a pair of “Private Display Glasses” – glasses which are meant to allow you to watch immersive video from the comfort of your own sofa/bed/deckchair – is hacked into a new, 3D-printed shell (the files for the shell are available on Thingiverse), and attached to a Pi along with a mini-keyboard, which lives in your pocket.
(On watching that video, Gordon said “That looks silly.” I replied: “SO DOES YOUR FACE.” There is a hostile working environment at Pi Towers.)
We love it as a proof of concept, and it’s not too much of a leap to get voice recognition (which the Pi handles admirably – you’ll find a mountain of pointers in this forum thread) working on a piece of kit like this; mounting a Raspberry Pi camera board on there shouldn’t be too much of a stretch either. If you have a go yourselves, get in touch: we’d love to see where this goes next!
27 comments
Mark Daniels
Let’s call it GoggleGlass (TM)
DT
I think “Pi-Eye” would be a good name for it!! :-)
Mr.Pi
That was my name for it before I saw this
Chow Loong Jin
How about Raspberry Peye? *ducks under a desk*
Pygar
That sound in the distance is lawyers sharpening their teeth…
But whatever name they get, I like the idea. RasPiGlass?
I’ve never known where to ask this, but since I am posting anyway… when I was a kid, I *loved* my GAF Viewmaster. Most reels were of sculpted “cartoons” (Think Donald Duck if he were stop-motion, minus the motion) or museum displays (dinosaur bones!
But some of them were regular TV shows- Star Trek, Batman (a Julie Newmar episode I was too young to truly appreciate!) which were somehow reframed to look 3D. Now I see the price going down on glasses evidently used by both eyes, but no one seems to make them so adjust as to generate 3D like Viewmaster…
So… what did they know how to do in the Sixties that they don’t know how to do now, to generate 3D-ish images from single frames of film?
Andrew
No – it must be called PiGlass. A bit like spy glass, which is what google glass is.
gaz
Glassberry
Tim
Thay are going to rot ther brians!
Liz Upton
Alms for a poor ex-leper!
Pygar
“Cheer up, Brian! You know what they say…”
Robert_M
:::clears throat:::
“Always Look on the Pi Side of Life!
Do. Do-doo. Do-doo, do-doo, do-doo…”
HFLaursen
@Pygar: the Viewmaster had two slides, one for each eye, so given proper stereo-3D slides (one recorded for left eye, and one for right eye), this gave a ‘real’ 3D depth experience. You cannot automatically convert *one* flat image to stereo-3D, but you have some more data to work with thru video. If the camera is moving, you can use one frame for one eye, then wait a bit and use that frame for the other eye. This will provide the eye-separation required for a stereo-3D frame. However, if some of the contents in the frame is moving one way, and some other content is moving the other way, you will get bad depth impressions – usually ‘negagive’ depth, or flat frames without depth.
Pygar
I doubt they did any such thing in adapting existing TV shows. Maybe showing the same frame to both eyes caused some form of (acceptable to a kid) pseudo-3D effect… I know how conventional 3D is done. I just find it hard to imagine they found so many frames in which the camera moved but Julie Newmar didn’t! I do seem to recall that the image had a bit more on *one* side of the reel than the other, and vice versa. If that can make pseudo-3D from flat images, then my hope of watching 3D Sixties stuff may be not too outrageous after all… Thanks for the reply!
Jancis
Oh, wow, an accomplishmen. Now what will you do with it?
Pete
I spy with my little pi…
Stu
sPi-Glass, surely?
atillad
i am not sure how it would work or how to flip the screen but if you set up a small angled peace of glass to act as a reflecter so you can see through the screen yet still see the screen that would be neet. quite simular to google glass. i would say pi glass would be a awesom name or pi vision ither way love the idea.
ClikeX
The Raspberry Peye.
bertwert
Do Pi users like stealing products from other companies and making it their own way? (Google: Google Glass (Pi Glass), Apple: Ipad (PiPad), etc.)
Great job!
James Hughes
I’m pretty sure copying an idea for your own use is not ‘stealing’…
meltwater
This is going to be even more awesome using the Pi Compute module…dual camera, dual screen. You could have a system which converts between Google Glass style, into Oculus Rift/Morpheus modes.
Cory
Raspberry Pye… Just a suggestion for a name!
Crafterkid123
Thats my last name xD
nathanael
That display would be perfect for flying a DIY drone with on-board camera. You could simultaneously watch it from the ground and get a bird’s eye view.
conrad goodwin
@pygar:
Stereoscopy is I think the word for the science.
Try wp>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscope
To make viewmaster-compatible images, you only need two cameras set about the same distance apart as your eyes. Then when the images are shown separately to their corresponding eyes, it “looks real”.
The technique was used for making topographic maps too – an airplane with two cameras would take pictures of terrain, and with a kind of glorified viewmaster, the engineers in the office could plot countour lines on their maps. I think there are automated solutions for that now.
Cheers.
teufelswelt
Using the compute module, this would be amazing.
Dawn Hewitson
Love this idea, now looking for a snazzy pair of specs to try it out with.