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

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

Supposedly, you could take the image from the camera, and procces it, and send it in the user packets to a dashboard program that would procces it and the next 3 data packets together into a 64 bit color display at 60x80 at 12.5hz (you can scale it up of course). you would take the average r g and b values for 4 pixels, and if it was less than 85, send a 0, otherwise, 1, take 8 of these, and put in a byte, repeat for rest of image. once you have all 600 bytes of this info for red, send that in the data packet, and half of green. the next packet would be half of green and blue, then repeat, except that you use 116 instad of 85. the image would be blurred from the 20 ms between the shoots, and the dashboard would display the current rgbr1 and update the green1 and blue1 for example

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

Does anyone know where to find an (affordable) eyepiece? I've been wanting to make a HUD to augment my vision with time left in match and battery levels. I would just run the same screen as the laptop we are getting in the KOP.

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

I believe there were teams who did break down the images from the camera this year to send back to their dashboard. It was pretty awesome. This year for bacon though we had LEDs on a PVC pipe (so that the operator could see them without having to look away) and they signaled when 1) the camera could see any particle 2) when the particle was centered 3) when our rpm on the shooter was at the appropriate speed to fire (the camera gave us an estimated distance to the target using the size of the particle, and we had an equation for distance to rpms). It worked fairly well, and was a fairly simple solution to impliment.

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

through my research i think the most affordable eyepiece would be buying glasses with two displays and cutting it in half

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

Can I have the other half?

It seems like you're on the right track here after re-reading some of your posts. I really think you could pull this off and make it some kind of effective tool, even if it's only in a controlled environment. Is your intent to make a system that would help the Drive Team line themselves up with trailers better (For this Game at Least)?

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

That would be one of the example uses for it, I don't think I'd have it ready by Duel, maybe a prototype at Ramp? But I think that the eyepiece would be a very useful tool in any game, if you could find a use for it, especially for alignments to game objects.

Re: Thoughts on Augmented Reality?
 

http://www.mouser.com/nkk_oled/

How's that for ya now? :)