...And would like some help to perfect them! They are see-through and work just like any pair of shades, only when you glance down there is kind of like a dashboard screen floating in mid-air.

Sound like a dream? -Well, as nice as they already are, there is lots of room for perfection, and that's where I hope to get some help in some kind of joint effort. Then we can all have both some fun and get really useful stuff at the same time... What do you say?

I have given a brief description of my glasses at Hackaday.com, but only as a comment to another very old post. Probably it has gone unnoticed, and that is why I feel it might be a good idea to bring the subject up here...

The glasses are for real and really cool. Below is a cut and paste from Hackaday:

"I bought the Myvu Crystal EV:s and scavenged the display optics for a wearable project. Some things I have learned:

* It is possible to put the displays inside a pair of sunglasses instead of outside them.

* The sunglasses I used only needed to be made to protrude a barely noticable amount extra from the face to make room for the prisms. Nobody around me seems to notice anything peculiar about the glasses.

* Placing the optics at an angle just under the eyes, there is no obstruction of the view of the world outside. The screen is viewable by glancing down, just like on a car dashboard.

* The lower eyelid can sit directly against the prism without the picture quality deteriorating. This is possible since the specified “eye relief” of 10 mm is a maximum allowing for prescription glass insets. There is however no minimum, the optics behaves similarly to the oculars of a pair of binoculars or a microscope.

* You might expect that having the prisms this close to the eyes should be dangerous, with a high risk of accidentally poking out the eyes. This does not appear to be so, however. Glancing down, the eyes only need to be barely open for a full view of the screen. The eyelids and -lashes therefore prevents direct contact with the corneas. As for blunt impact prevention, I use ample amounts of padding resin to smooth the glassy edges of the prisms and to make large support areas under each eye. But, I have not yet bumped into anything to find out the hard way what will happen… I expect a black eye but no piercing trauma.

* The padding under each eye significantly helps to relieve the nose from the weight of the glasses. I however need to research for more skin-friendly plastics, I seem to react to the stuff I’m using now.

* The reflection angle of the prisms is too shallow to be able to completely overlap the twin images without difficulty. A lightweight and unobtrusive design is also to flimsy to keep such alignment stable, instead calling for large, angular, ugly and generally Star Trekky designs I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. Or if I did wear it, my wife would certainly kill me.

* Instead, I have opted to let the screens display side-by-side. This may preclude some of the really awesome 3D possibilities inherent in twin displays. However, and I think this is really important, it is possible to let the viewable area extend across the two screens, in effect working as an “extended desktop”.

* By the side-by-side display design, the pixel density is in effect doubled and extends that of high-end and military HMD designs without their bulk, cost and minimal availability.

* For now, both displays will show the same image. This is a pity. I hope someone reading this can help me to device some clever electronics to show different images in the displays. What is needed is to take the video-out from a smartphone, cut each frame in half and feed each part separately to the respective microdisplays. It should be doable!

* In essence, the glasses I made work as they are. Really usable wearable displays are possible today, before flat holographic waveguides etc.

Posted at 10:05 am on Mar 5th, 2010 by Staffan"

No reactions?
-Well here are some pictures of my son wearing the latest iteration of the glasses.
//Staffan

Another closer look:

Welcome aboard. Your glasses sound like they're ready for DARPA funding all ready. I'm over my head on this subject. My interests are Folding@home and CNC / the RepRap Mendel project.

There has been a lot of interest, work and discussion on hacking the My-vue glasses and I'm sure that they'd be excited by your work. Please cross post what you have here, or post a link in the following forum viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2955

I'll go set a pointer back right now.

Thanks for joining up.

Cool project!

The description was nice, but it is amazing to see actual pictures of the glasses. They don't look modified in the least to the untrained eye. Nice build.

Any chances of getting a shot of the actual display with the camera?

i wish i had video sunglasses to play around with but alas i don't have much money. these glasses could probally make a nice hud if you add some gps funtionaltiy to it

I've been following Bruce Sterling's Wired magazine blog postings about Augmented Reality, mostly iPhone and Android cell phone stuff. They use the GPS and compass to superimpose info on what the camera sees out the back. Google "augmented reality sterling" for a long list of posts and speeches about the growth of this tech.

Thanks, all!

I'm now in the process of putting together the umpteenth iteration of the frames for the glasses. Its much fun to learn so much about working with plastics and different forms of rapid prototyping. From dabbling with epoxi resins and being close to developing allergic eczema to CAD/CAM...

So far, the best method has however proved to be to design the frames from a combination of soldered copper plate and PVC coating (Fimo polymer clay). I prefer the direct feel in my hands and the quick fitting of the plastics in front of the bathroom mirror to doing virtual work in 3D CAD.

Apart from crude copper plate (.15-.50 mm), I use expanded metal meshes for the sculpting, since it is so much more pliable. I will also be testing carbon fibre "prepreg" methods shortly... If anyone is interested I'll lay out my methods in more detail, it is really nice to be able to do your own pro-looking cases and other mechanic details for different projects... Everyone their own designer.

The next set of frames will have adjustment screws for aligning the screen images more exactly according to different users. Once done, I'll be digitizing the model to continue the work using CAD. The plan is to be able to fine-tune for series production. Its surprisingly cheap to have a manufacturer produce really quite small series of plastic details... Wow! Exciting times!

Hopefully there will then be both open-source CAD files and cheap kits for the community so that we can all make our own basic hardware... High-res dataglasses that are weararable in public without people around snickering at the design.

As for electronics, I'm now teaming up with two Stockholm based hackerspaces, Proxxi and Abbenay Hackspace. The current plan is try and use USB and make the new video card act as host, if possible. That will open up the design for more smartphones on the market. Otherwise, there is HDMI-out on the new HTC Android models, and I'm sure this is a coming thing for almost all new phones in the future...

So, soon I expect the glasses to display 480X1280 pixels. Mmm... Sweet... That is when the glasses will become truly useful. Finally it will open up the web to me, I can run any app at high resolution and also do remote desktopping... Future, finally here...

//Staffan

what cads software are you using?

What are you using for the Rapid Prototyping, a commercial machine or hacker built RepRap type - powder sintering, fusion deposition, etc? I like your hand modeling approach for the 'finger knowledge' looking in the mirror and feeling fit and finish gives so much quicker turn around than hours on CAD and then waiting for a part.

I could use / should start a RepRap hacker space group where I live just for the feedback loop. Will look up the ones you mentioned in Stockholm.

I work at a university with several different machines, none of them hacker type. All services are open to all employees, as long as we get a "drivers licence". Sorry to say, I have not yet come around to getting mine... I got (extensive) help to make some crude first attempts at a physical print. I can look up the different types we have. The university also has a contract with a firm that has all conceivable types of machines, where we don't pay per model, only for the cost of actual plastics used. The finish and mechanical properties are top of the line...

As you can see, I was using the word "rapid prototyping" in a quite loose sense, since the only important modelling work has been with polymer clay on metal armature, not digital modelling which proved much slower in my hands, but then I'm very,very far from beeing a pro...

I'm however down to a few hours even from scratch to something wearable using Fimo if need be. I'm pretty sure that turnover will never be beaten even by the best CAD guys... The process is however completely incremental, and with a hot-gas soldering iron I can build on top of previous work, fixate new fine detail or cut away cured plastics with a hot blade on the go.



I like zbrush a lot, particularly how it can be used for intuitive free-form modelling and "painting" new parts on top of a base model so that they will snap together if converted to plastics (lids and covers etc). I think this is probably the program that will be most useful when I have digitized the glasses (using a mechanical digitizer at the university).

At least I also used to be familiar with 3D Studio Max, which I used for a short animation job for a medical start-up a few years ago. Nothing fancy, and I'm not sure if I can still handle the program properly (lots of new versions since).

Finally, I have had some formal (if basic) training also in solid modelling (ProEngineer), and I know how to do very basic stuff in SolidWorks...

If anyone has tips for better programs, I'm all ears. However, why dont some of you guys jump onboard the project? -Once digitized, I'll gladly publish some meshes for further work!

//Staffan

personally i like solid works but i'm not very good with it. At the moment i am desgining a really cheap cnc maching with it. My professor who thought me solid works just used solid professor, so if you want to quickly learn solid works try solid professor

People who haven't tried the glasses on yet often wonder why the alignment of the screens should double both size and resolution of the image. It is not apparent how feeding separate halves of a video output to the individual eyes can combine to a large total image with high resolution.

Well, there is a simple experiment anyone can do to better understand the principle:

* Hold a piece of paper between the eyes (see picture).

* Look at what is in front of you. First look to the left,
then to the right.

* Notice how you automatically ”switch eyes” and can concentrate on detail as seen by just
one eye at a time.

Using the sunglasses is actually less straining to the eyes than to use use "classic" visors that put the images on top of each other. Since everyone has a slightly different distance between the eyes, the picture alignment is seldom perfect. Instead the pictures will blur, and the brain and eyes will try to make the best to compensate. This is one of the reasons people get headaches and nausea and why the perceived image resolution is often even lower than the specifications for commercial videoglasses... Well, problem solved!

//Staffan

Hey... Made a couple of powerpoints illustrating the previous post. Comments? //Staffan

Sorry, had to pull the files. If you could upload slightly smaller images, or link thumbnails to the full image, that would work best.