If you’re into pushing tech boundaries from home, this one’s for you. Redditor [mi_kotalik] has crafted ‘Zero’, a custom pair of DIY augmented reality (AR) glasses using a Raspberry Pi Zero. Designed as an affordable, self-contained device for displaying simple AR functions, Zero allows him to experiment without breaking the bank. With features like video playback, Bluetooth audio, a teleprompter, and an image viewer, Zero is a testament to what can be done with determination and creativity on a budget. The original Reddit thread includes videos, a build log, and links to documentation on X, giving you an in-depth look into [mi_kotalik]’s journey. Take a sneak peek through the lens here.

Creating Zero wasn’t simple. From designing the frame in Tinkercad to experimenting with transparent PETG to print lenses (ultimately switching to resin-cast lenses), [mi_kotalik] faced plenty of challenges. By customizing SPI displays and optimizing them to 60 FPS, he achieved an impressive level of real-time responsiveness, allowing him to explore AR interactions like never before. While the Raspberry Pi Zero’s power is limited, [mi_kotalik] is already planning a V2 with a Compute Module 4 to enable 3D rendering, GPS, and spatial tracking.

Zero is an inspiring example for tinkerers hoping to make AR tech more accessible, especially after the fresh news of both Meta and Apple cancelling their attempts to venture in the world of AR. If you are into AR and eager to learn from an original project like this one, check out the full Reddit thread and explore Hackaday’s past coverage on augmented reality experiments.

Thanks to the exploding popularity of First Person View (FPV) RC flying over the last couple of years, the cost of the associated hardware has dropped rapidly. Today you can get entry-level FPV goggles for under $40 USD on various import sites. For the money you’re getting a 5.8 GHz receiver, battery, and an LCD display; even if the components themselves aren’t exactly high end, at that price it’s essentially an impulse buy.

[nomand] didn’t necessarily have a use for a cheap FPV headset, but he did like the idea of having a pocket sized display that he could pass off to others so they could see what he’s seeing during flights. So he harvested the principle components from a Eachine VR006 headset and designed a new 3D printed enclosure for them. The final result looks fantastic, and is much cheaper than commercial alternatives on the market.

He’s created an exceptionally detailed step-by-step guide on how you can perform the conversion yourself in the project’s GitHub repository, and has also put together a video where he goes over the modification and discusses the end result. [nomand] clearly intends for this to be a project for others to duplicate instead of a one-off build, and given the price and final results, we wouldn’t be surprised if this conversion becomes popular in FPV circles.

Perhaps the best part of this project is that it requires almost no modification of the original hardware; just soldering two wires because the original connector is too large. Otherwise just need to take the headset apart carefully, and transplant the components into the 3D-printed case [nomand] has meticulously designed. The case is so well designed it doesn’t even need any fasteners, it slides together and everything is held in with some strategically placed pieces of foam.

Between this modification and the custom built spectator display we covered recently, it looks like there’s a clear demand for sub-$50 portable FPV monitors. Seems odd that no manufacture is trying to fill this niche so far.

This may come as a shock, but some of those hot screaming deals on China-sourced gadgets and goodies are not all they appear. After you plunk down your pittance and wait a few weeks for the package to arrive, you just might find that you didn’t get exactly what you thought you ordered. Or worse, you may get a product with unwanted bugs features, like some green lasers that also emit strongly in the infrared wavelengths.

Sure, getting a free death ray in addition to your green laser sounds like a bargain, but as [Brainiac75] points out, it actually represents a dangerous situation. He knows whereof he speaks, having done a thorough exploration of a wide range of cheap (and not so cheap) lasers in the video below. He explains that the paradox of an ostensibly monochromatic source emitting two distinct wavelengths comes from the IR laser at the heart of the diode-pumped solid state (DPSS) laser inside the pointer. The process is only about 48% efficient, meaning that IR leaks out along with the green light. The better quality DPSS laser pointers include a quality IR filter to remove it; cheaper ones often fail to include this essential safety feature. What wavelengths you’re working with are critical to protecting your eyes; indeed, the first viewer comment in the video is from someone who seared his retina with a cheap green laser while wearing goggles only meant to block the higher frequency light.

It’s a sobering lesson, but an apt one given the ubiquity of green lasers these days. Be safe out there; educate yourself on how lasers work and take a look at our guide to laser safety.

Yesterday Magic Leap announced that it will ship developer edition hardware in 2018. The company is best known for raising a lot of money. That’s only partially a joke, since the teased hardware has remained very mysterious and never been revealed, yet they have managed to raise nearly $2 billion through four rounds of funding (three of them raising more than $500 million each).

The announcement launched Magic Leap One — subtitled the Creator Edition — with a mailing list sign up for “designers, developers and creatives”. The gist is that the first round of hardware will be offered for sale to people who will write applications and create uses for the Magic Leap One.

We’ve gathered some info about the hardware, but we’ll certainly begin the guessing game on the specifics below. The one mystery that has been solved is how this technology is delivered: as a pair of goggles attaching to a dedicated processing unit. How does it stack up to current offerings?

What is Magic Leap?

Keeping the technology a mystery for years was a pretty good move. It let everyone imagine something much more advanced than could be possible right now. You likely remember the marketing image of an elephant in the palms of a user’s hands that broke the initial announcement back in 2014. The Wired article summarized Rony Abovitz’s boast as a new technology:

Magic Leap founder and CEO Rony Abovitz insists what he’s building isn’t mobile computing, Oculus-style virtual reality, or even augmented reality.

With the cat out of the bag we think those claims overstep. This is augmented reality as far as the broader term is concerned, but goes beyond into Mixed Reality (MR). MR is a type of AR that includes awareness of surroundings. So the Magic Leap promises to understand where tables, chairs, windows, doors, and hopefully cats and dogs are located when adding virtual items to your surroundings.

Magic Leap v. Hololens v. CastAR

These wearable goggles have the most in common with Microsoft’s Hololens and CastAR because all three feature see-through lenses that do not block out all of the world around you in the way that HTC Vive or Oculus Rift (both VR technologies) do. What’s interesting is the key differences between the three.

Unfortunately, CastAR closed their doors earlier this year but we still loved the technology. It was built on a set of wearable glasses that included two 720p projectors, one above each eye. The augmented reality experience depended on a retro-reflective material to use as a projection surface. That surface reflected the projected images back at the exact same angle they were received so several people can use the same surface at the same time without interfering with each other. One of the keys to success here is that what you’re seeing is actually coming from the physical location the user expects to see it.

Microsoft’s Hololens is a curved visor which you wear like a facemask, spanning from temple to temple and from the tip of your nose to above your brow. That visor is the projection surface so the user sees the real world, but the effect of projecting on the visor overlays images on what the user sees. The benefit of this is that you don’t need to have the retro-reflective material or any other gear separate from the head-mounted unit itself to make the experience happen.

Magic Leap appears to use lenses as the projection surface, like the Hololens, but uses two separate lenses instead of a single large visor. We’re keen to try this out because it may solve a problem we noticed when testing the Hololens: field of view (FOV).

The Hololens has a limited area where it can project that is smaller than the total viewable part of the visor itself. If your eye catches the “edge” of where the virtual items can be projected it breaks the experience. Looking at the smaller lenses of the Magic Leap it would be fantastic if this synchronizes the FOV for both the real and the virtual world, leaving no way to interrupt the perceived experience. Alas, hearing from reporters who received demos of the current prototypes, Magic Leap does have a rectangular projection area inside of the round lenses. We hope the production hardware can improve on this.

I was fortunate enough to try out the CastAR while still in development and it had a great FOV. But that was limited to the size of the retro-reflective material so you can say there was a similar experience-breaking issue.

The Secret Sauce… or Not

So, it can track head movement, it has a wearable transparent screen in front of each eye, and it has cameras and sensors to pick up the surroundings. How do you make this stand out from existing offerings?

The most verbose source of information we’ve found is the Rolling Stone article that ran yesterday. There is a lengthy section on light field and how a breakthrough in handling it is the revolutionary technology Magic Leap is built upon. The assertion is that your eye only needs specific important parts of the light field and your brain builds the rest. If you feed in those magic parts, your brain perceives something real is in front of your eyeballs.

The secret sauce is a chip — basically a custom sensor/DSP that knows how to take in a virtual image, reconcile it with the lightfield sensed by the cameras, and spit out an artificial light field sophisticated enough to fool your brain into filling in the gaps. The article makes it sound like they built a fab in the basement floor of their Florida-based operations. That’s rather incredible; the stuff you expect from Tony Stark (or some evil villian’s lair). It’s more likely they’re getting wafers fabbed and shipped bare for processing during in-house assembly of prototypes.

These light field breakthroughs are a mighty claim and we hope it’s true, because such an advancement would indeed be revolutionary. It seems we’ll have to wait and see. We want to read the white paper!

An interesting tidbit the Rolling Stone article does show is an image of the first proof of concept prototype. If you look close you can see two bits of glass held at 45 degrees to a chin rest like at the eye doctor. Despite hints of more, the system has been fundamentally glasses-based since the beginning.

Guess the Hardware

Time for everyone’s favorite game! How did they do it?

There’s almost no hardware information available in this reveal. But guessing is more fun anyway. Here’s what we can gather from the photos. The headmounted goggles have two wires coming off of them. They merge into one which snakes around to the Discman shaped, belt-mounted computing device that drives it. The handheld controller is wireless, and there is no apparent power supply as the disc-shaped unit incorporates a battery.

To be honest, the controller and CPU aren’t all that interesting. These are solved problems as far as hardware goes. The magic of Magic Leap is in the headset itself.

Position tracking is perhaps the most important part of this entire system. Sure, you could argue that optics make or break it and we’ll get to that in a minute. But if your perfect graphics are out of sync with the head movement of the user, motion sickness will ensure that the headgear will not be used.

Having seen the Intel Euclid demoed at Maker Faire last May, it’s obvious that camera tech for making sense of movement and the environment has come of age. The small Euclid has an entire computer and battery inside, which the Magic Leap moves to your belt. Fitting the rest into these goggles is not beyond belief. The guessing game becomes: what are the obvious lenses and sensors shown above used for?

There is a peripheral vision lens on either “corner” of the Magic Leap, two front-mounted cameras also on the corners, and two windows on the bridge above the nose that look like they might be for IR. The green circle shown on the left is a mystery (power button and indicator?) and the corresponding camera lens on the right is as well. Motion tracking likely uses at least two depth cameras — blasting an IR laser projector to draw a grid that can be interpreted by an IR camera. This is how Intel’s Realsense does it and Hololens takes a similar approach. The other cameras are likely used for object recognition and lighting condition processing.

The small holes at the bottom of the lenses and on the side show locations for three of the four microphones used to sense sound.

What Do You Think of Magic Leap?

We want to hear from you in the comments below. Did you spot any hints from what has been shown off of the hardware? Put on your reverse engineering hat and tell us what you can glean from this very limited info? Is this revolutionary or merely another incremental development in the VR/AR/MR scene?

Of course there are a lot of other questions left hanging out there. What will the Magic Leap One hardware cost? How do you interface with the controller, and what frameworks can be used for getting your code onto the machine? We’re looking forward to hearing what you think.

The venerable Commodore 64 got a lot of people started in computers, and a hard core of aficionados keeps the platform very much alive to this day. But a C64 just doesn’t have the horsepower to do anything more than some retro 8-bit graphics games, right?

Not if [jim_64] has anything to say about it. He’s created a pair of virtual-reality goggles for the C64, and the results are pretty neat. Calling them VR is a bit of a stretch, since that would imply the headset is capable of sensing the wearer’s movements, which it’s not. With just a small LCD screen tucked into the slot normally occupied by a smartphone in the cheap VR goggles [jim64] used as a foundation for his build, this is really more of a 3D wearable display — so far. The display brings 3D-graphics to the C64, at least for the “Street Defender” game that [jim64] authored, a demo of which can be seen below. We’ll bet position sensing could be built into the goggles to control the game too. Even then it won’t be quite the immersive (and oft-times nauseating) experience that VR has become, but for a 35-year old platform, it’s not too shabby.

Looking for more C64 love? We’ve got a million of ’em — case mods, C64 laptops, tablets, even CPU upgrades.

Thanks to [P Gessle] for the heads up on this one.

If you’ve always wanted to see in the dark but haven’t been able to score those perfect Soviet-era military surplus night vision goggles, you may be in luck. Now there’s an open-source night vision monocular that you can build to keep tabs on the nighttime goings-on in your yard.

Where this project stands out is not so much the electronics — it’s really just a simple CCD camera module with the IR pass filter removed, an LCD screen to display the image, and a big fat IR LED to throw some light around. [MattGyver92] seemed to put most of his effort into designing a great case for the monocular, at the price of 25 hours of 3D printer time. The main body of the case is nicely contoured, the eyepiece has a comfortable eyecup printed in NinjaFlex, and the camera is mounted on a ball-and-socket gimbal to allow fine off-axis angle adjustments. That comes in handy to eliminate parallax errors while using the monocular for nighttime walks with both eyes open. One quibble: the faux mil-surp look is achieved with a green filter over the TFT LCD panel. We wonder if somehow eliminating the red and blue channels from the camera might not have been slightly more elegant.

Overall, though, we like the way this project came out, and we also like the way [MattGyver92] bucked the Fusion 360 trend and used SketchUp to design the case. But if walking around at night with a monocular at your face isn’t appealing, you can always try biohacking yourself to achieve night vision.

We can’t see much without our glasses (which is why our habit of shaving in the shower often ends badly). Our glasses cost a bundle, but we wear them every waking moment so it’s worth it. But only recently did we break down and spring for prescription sunglasses. However, when it comes to sports we don’t pony up the dough for dedicated specs. Here’s a hack that will change that. If you’ve still got your last set of glasses on hand hack up the lenses for swimming goggles or other applications.

In this case [Dashlb’s] lenses were already small enough to fit in the goggles. He simply added a bead of Sugru around the edges to hold the lenses in place. But if you do need to cut them to size aligning the lenses with your eyes is important, so we suggest the following: have a buddy stand in front of you and mark the center of your pupil on the glasses, as well as the goggles. If you need to cut down the lenses (which are probably a type of polycarbonate) just make sure the marks match up before doing any cutting.

We might give this a try with some wrap-around sunglasses to make an inexpensive pair of prescription cycling shades.