Inspiration
I used to be the person that did Apple Vision Pro demos for other people at the Apple Store, and that is my favorite apple product. It is the device with the most accessibility features that apple makes. However, the price point is very unaccessible. I wanted to make my own version of these augmented reality glasses that demonstrate the engineering prowess of apple, in an affordable package that anyone could use.
What it does
The ProVision Glasses are an attatchment that can attach to any glasses that transform your boring reading glasses into augmented reality glasses. It has a heads up display that connects to your phone via Bluetooth on a custom built Android app(I have an android because I broke my iPhone...) that allows you to control the glasses.
How we built it
I built it using a microprocessor(ESP32) and a 1 inch OLED display which reflects off of a piece of plastic that I got from an old soap dispenser. I designed a custom 3D printed component to hold all the components and attached it using a very rigid adhesive. The android app was built using flutter and android studios and connect with google maps API for directions.
Challenges we ran into
Aside from this being my first hardware project, I started off this project trying to power it with a Raspberry Pi zero 2 W instead of an ESP32. This was a big challenge since I was having trouble connecting to SSH. I could not connect a keyboard to program it directly since I had no adapter and this was the only form of hardware that I had that had bluetooth and wifi capabilities. I am not from UCF so I had trouble accessing a 3D printer. Luckily Shine's let me use their 3D printer which allowed me to print my designs after struggling to find access to 3D printers. The screens that I have for this project, were really cheap on amazon. So normal functions to horizontally flip the display so that you aren't reading backwards(because of the fact that it's a reflection off of a piece of plastic). I had to learn about how pixel manipulation works and used nested for loops in order to modify how the buffers on the display were shown.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I am supper proud of the fact that it works! This is my first of hopefully many hardware projects in the future and considering the fact that I struggled to set up SSH for the first 10 hours, I am super proud of the product I made. I am proud of the fact that I designed my own 3D printed housing for my components, and I'm super proud of everything I learned from coding in Arduino C to learning Flutter and Android Studios, Fusion360, and I'm proud of the optics behind it. It took a lot of planning to be able to view the screen without having it block your field of view.
What we learned
I was happy to learn about making 3D printed housing for my components, coding in Arduino C to , Flutter, Android Studios and Fusion360
What's next for ProVision Glasses
For the future, I would ideally like to add more applications to it. Right now it only has notifications, maps, and the time with the goal of having you not look at your phone so much. But I would like for it to replace your phone one day with adding a microphone and speaker, and maybe even a camera to have a context based AI companion that sees what you see.
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