Wearables in FRC

[marshall]

Originally Posted by udpatil

Yes, the smart glasses were connected via USB before the match began because the most time required to setup the glasses was when running the jar file. We talked to the refs at our competition and they said as long as the operator isn't wearing them while they are attached during autonomous we are fine. So, we just leave them on the driver station during autonomous.

The operator is wearing safety glasses and the vuzix smart glasses came with their own safety glasses and mount (how convenient). As you can see in that second picture (linked again: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_S...YtUGFxOVE/view), the operator puts the vuzix smart glasses on while pushing the original safety glasses above his head so that he can use the smart glasses while still being safe by wearing safety glasses.

The story behind Vuzix:
Last year (2015 Recycle Rush), I contacted Oculus to see if they would be willing to donate a VR headset so that our programming team would be able to experiment and create new, creative ways to control the robot and view it's camera feed. We even had the Oculus Rift DK2 working with stereoscopic camera feeds from two Axis cameras, but we weren't able to use it because it obscured the operator's view (safety issue).
So, this year (2016 Stronghold), I began researching augmented reality as an alternative to the virtual reality we experimented with last year. I found the Vuzix m100 as a good solution because they used Android (which I know how to program for) and had a preexisting safety glass mount. I was able to get in contact with the CEO of Vuzix (praise LinkedIn) and he directed me to one of his associates who was able to get us the m100 smart glasses with the condition that we could do some PR stuff for them (send pictures and describe what were accomplishing etc). Because we were able to get the smart glasses for free, we had the resources to experiment with this implementation of wearables which we thought worked out wonderfully.

Very cool and great use of LinkedIn!