Open Source Smart Glasses

Smart glasses will serve as the next generation mobile computing device because always-on egocentric sensors and immediately accessible information opens up a vast number of use cases that smart phones alone cannot deliver. Examples of use cases uniquely enabled by smart glasses include contextual associative live search engines, conversational intelligence, memory augmentation, wearable brain sensing, content creation, content consumption, reasoning and decision support systems, captions for the deaf, therapeutic brain stimulation, vehicular command and control, remote mentoring, egocentric video calling, wearable teleprompter, and much more. However, in order for researchers to explore these possibilities and for companies to bring them to market requires smart glasses hardware that is physically comfortable, socially acceptable, and extendable. Current smart glasses solutions on the market meet only one, or none, of these three criteria.

We are developing the Open Source Smart Glasses (OSSG) project to meet these three criteria. These smart glasses are designed for extendibility, giving users the ability to add their own hardware and software to the system, allowing for rapid prototyping of ideas. The light, slim form factor of the glasses make them indistinguishable from regular glasses (for the user and those seeing the user), solving the problems of physical and social discomfort that current smart glasses solutions cause. The OSSG provides a platform for researchers, industry, and individuals to explore and take advantage of the vast space of possibilities that smart glasses create. The project also encapsulates a number of immediately useful smart glasses apps (live language translation, captions, note-taking, intelligent assistant, memory tools, etc.) which will run on the OSSG.