Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

Okay well as a fun side project, and maybe we might see it these next few years pop up in FIRST, I've been planning on a video HUD for a robot.

Now my question is how whats everybody's thoughts on this kinda of HID (Human Interface Device)?

My view is simple, it makes it easier to drive a robot since you are seeing the first person view of the robot so no incidents like no being able to see because of glare like in 2008 Overdrive, or behind a pile of robots. But there are even other fun things you can do with it

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

is it going to be plugged into a laptop or the DS ethernet?
i find your idea to be a very cool one, and you could annotate the video stream with things like battery voltage, time left in match, (or in overdrive, maybe laps completed)

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

the laptop via VGA cable at least i hope it will work this way, this way using the Dashboard I can get all that nice sensor data and stuff like that, it would also have a gyro so if you wanted you could turn on an optional control of just moving the camera to scope around.

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

i havent ever seen vga goggles.
is th gyro on the goggles or in the robot, how would you turn the camera?

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

I believe Frog Force has a set up such as this already actually. We played a match with them in Archimedes and they had wired up colored LED's to a pair of safety glasses that the driver wore. Every time a certain event happened on the field (i.e. camera lock, shooting...), one of the lights would turn on. I forget what exactly the lights meant, but it seemed to work out quite well for them

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

thats the thing havent found VGA glasses so i plan on either a)making an in house system or b) buying one with RCA and coverting it to VGA

the gyro would be on the glasses and would be plugged in the dig. inputs on DS

quiet a few teams have done this, but this would be using video from the camera itself on the robot allowing more of a First person view

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

though, the video has to be streamed to the laptop first. this year it was blocked.
unless you put it in the user data portion, then you wouldnt have video to the glasses

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

see you can stream it to the dashboard but make the video take up the whole screen and then make the glasses the 1 display and the computer screen the 2nd

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

http://www.vrealities.com/sony.html

Haha.... Money... and time to develop LabView/C Code that would generate valid VGA/SVideo data....

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

It wasn't hard for us to create a Java display as a radar this year. Post-season testing proved that it was extremely accurate for detection within its bounds (min range 3 feet, max range 30 feet). So if we can't stream video next year, perhaps the camera can detect objects and send the location data back to the DS in small packets like this year. Then the client-side code recreates what the robot sees, but without all of the distracting details. This also offloads ALOT of the processing from the cRIO.

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

Nick, the issue you would face with any kind of video feedback used for real time control is the amount of lag between the robot's motion and what you see. Depending on the system you use you could get something with no noticeable lag, but as most budget systems are going to have some kind of lag you might have issues. Just for reference, the '09 Robot (The Shumper!) was geared to have a top speed of about 12.5fps. If you were going full speed and had a lag of 1/10th of a second the robot would be 1.25 feet from where the video says it is... Now that problem wouldn't be such and issue on a slower robot.

Also, I know you and I spoke about the LED's in Safety Glasses for feedback before. I'd love to see you get that going :D

Message or Call me sometime, Just because I graduated doesn't mean I'm not around. Lol.

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

Lag is one of my only concerns with the system, don't get me wrong there Dustin, that is why instead of a pair of glasses it would be an eyepiece attached to something like safety glasses.
this way you still would have a sense of whats going on.

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

I know of a system that does this- but it was 4k resolution and about 50K$ cost- at least. But seeing the demo was incredible.

They sell 'cubes' - each cube is an OLED display and can be interfaced... but I don't recall the name of the company or the price. I can find it if you're interested- email me/pm.

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

You can get OLED screens for less then $4000, the screen that i am using in my touchscreen project is an OLED screen. It costs $174, but it doesn't have a video in, it is controlled by an atmega 256. There could be enough processing power to display an NTSC or PAL signal though.

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

Whoops- meant to say that the screen resolution of several of these cubes was around 4k pixels- not 4k dollars. The whole HUD unit screwed onto your head (yes, I mean screwed) and it was pretty impressive. We had to have coworkers standing on all sides to catch the person once they lost their visual orientation of vertical- they'd tip right over.

For a Video glasses you can get now- although out of stock- Sparkfun!

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/pro...oducts_id=8750