VR news: Oculus Quest owners, you can now play your PC VR games through the USB-C cable!
- Thread starter Montoya
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This is about a prototype that I am building. It works, but not finished.
Similar to HoloLens 2 in a way, but somewhat different design and use cases. Devices like HoloLens have always required special glasses to work, and they're expensive. It's still $125 /month. On the other hand those devices are incredibly useful in manufacturing, industrial equipment handling, and there are some medical uses as well. A surgeon can virtually explain a complex surgery to another doctor, from 2000 miles away, and supervise the surgery in real time. I've seen that work. Amazing. Not actually very mobile.
I wanted this to be an accessible and affordable technology, that people could carry with them, while driving to the grocery store, doing the groceries, or mowing the grass. Even walking around the office at work. That's something the HoloLens 2 can't do very well. It's not really mobile. It's got issues for people with bad vision. It's expensive. And it makes you feel and look a little bit like a computer part. Those are some of the problems I wanted to solve. Big order it turns out, but I found help from some amazing sources.
It's a device that you fit to your glasses, prescription or not. Or it will be able to once it's all put together. It has a camera that sees visual , IR and UV if you need, and a projection of it's display. It has audio too, and uses an AI so it's voice sounds more natural. That's what I'm talking about when i mention my damned AI, usually because it screwed up and said something funny as hell but maybe a little disturbing too. It has a tendency to mispronounce things at the moment. And the design started out as a medical device, for people with low vision, but grew as it developed into a kind of extension of a cell phone that anyone can use if it works properly. I'm not finished it yet, it's just a prototype to see if it's worth doing.
I want the price point for this to be below the threshold for "expensive". The software is probably going to become open source, so that it might benefit from others experience, and keep the total cost down to something approaching "Hey I can afford that". I just find that anything that smells of medical device to be very expensive, and honestly there's nothing special about this. It uses some software and small digital camera equipment to make someone's life better, and not cost them an arm and a leg in the meantime. And I don't want to manufacture anything, I just want something affordable out there, because people who meet the primary use case don't generally have the money to pay for other devices that they can't even take to the store. So it's more of a kit, that a high school or college student could use to put the device together, and learn how this is done. That's the idea anyway.
I want the price point for this to be below the threshold for "expensive". The software is probably going to become open source, so that it might benefit from others experience, and keep the total cost down to something approaching "Hey I can afford that". I just find that anything that smells of medical device to be very expensive, and honestly there's nothing special about this. It uses some software and small digital camera equipment to make someone's life better, and not cost them an arm and a leg in the meantime. And I don't want to manufacture anything, I just want something affordable out there, because people who meet the primary use case don't generally have the money to pay for other devices that they can't even take to the store. So it's more of a kit, that a high school or college student could use to put the device together, and learn how this is done. That's the idea anyway.