[Mechanical keyboard clacking]
[SPROING!]
[smash!]
[Triumphant marching-band music]
Ladies, gentlemen, and cyborgs... we did it!
Voidstar Lab has officially joined the four-digit club! We beat the odds, we did the impossible,
we got to 1000 subscribers without a pillow shaped like a subscribe button! As a tribute to YOU,
the handsomest and most intellectual audience on YouTube, I'm going to acknowledge the elephant on
my face. This wearable computer has appeared in all but one of my videos, and that video was bad.
That wasn't a coincidence, because the Optigon isn't a prop. I'm wearing a fully-functional
heads-up display that I use as a teleprompter, and if you don't believe me, get in my eyeball.
Welcome to my left eyeball! As you can see, this is a transparent display about the size
of an iPad held at arm's length. It's a lot like a Google Glass except it's positioned in front of
my eye and the picture is about four times larger. Unlike a Glass, the Optigon doesn't have a camera.
Also, the thing on my face is just the display; the computer part of
the wearable computer is this belt pack. It's basically a screenless Android tablet.
So, how did I make this thing, and how did it end up on my face? Why
does every episode of Voidstar Lab feature a wearable computer?
Well, my story begins like all epics of the modern era - as an intern.
The year is 2007 and I still thought I could pass engineering school.
I had a summer job working for an entrepreneur named [in enthusiastic British accent] Simon
Buckingham. I'm not making fun of him - that's actually how he introduced himself.
I was ghostwriting a blog post and I ended up on Hackaday. This guy discovered that a $25
replacement headset from a Wild Planet spy car was super-easy to turn into a wearable computer.
I thought this was the coolest thing ever, AND the headset was in stock, AND it was on sale!
My finger circled the 'Buy' button like a shark around a tender baby.
You see, my previous hack, a Nerf ammo counter, turned out to be a hot-sauce diarrhea dump,
and I wasn't exactly confident that I COULD finish an electronics project.
I decided to take the responsible choice and think about it til I got home. So as soon as I arrived,
I jumped on the Wild Planet website and discovered that Hackaday readers had hoovered up every
single damn headset. I even called the Wild Planet warehouse to beg for spares, but some
Fart-Suckerberg had beaten me to it and cleaned them out. A normie would have stopped here, but
by Jove, I was a nerd, and I wanted to stick a computer on my face. It was ON.
I settled on the Vuzix iWear AV230 as the display, an Arduino Uno as the brains,
and a coat hanger as the headset. Yeah, an Arduino! The Vuzix had a 320x240 resolution, but
the Arduino couldn't buffer a single monochrome frame. It was a terrible choice! But despite not
knowing anything about soldering, electronics, or really anything of relevance to the project,
I did manage to finish a functional wearable computer. Literally immediately, I wore it to
the New Jersey Tech Meetup. They were doing some sort of best-pitch award that night, and my new
cybernetic augmentations gave me an insurmountable edge. So this guy Bert sees my heads-up display,
asks me if I want to join a hackerspace. I don't know what a hackerspace is, so I say hell yeah!
It turns out he was actually FOUNDING a hackerspace, so yeah, we made a hackerspace.
They somehow got Eben Upton, the guy who invented the Raspberry Pi, to go to the hackerspace and do
a meet-and-greet. I wanted to show off, so I bought a new video headset, the MyVu Crystal,
I unbent another coat hanger, and I built another improved heads-up display
to connect to a Raspberry Pi. Eben loved the project, he signed the Pi, and I have
cherished that ever since. [Sheepishly] It is my personal favorite single board computer. [Cough]
Then, a well-known tech company released a wearable computer and I threw myself on that
bandwagon face-first. [Google Glass camera shutter sound] Around that time, I started
building prototypes and I formed Voidstar Lab. One client wanted an augmented-reality
bike helmet and we built it around an off-the-shelf video headset made by Epson.
I liked the Moverio so much that it inspired another wearable, the Optigon, which is what
you see here. Actually, all of my wearables are called Optigon because I am profoundly uncreative.
If you have another name idea that doesn't involve Dragonball, put it in a comment.
The Moverio series are Android-based video headsets. Epson's marketing
features first-person drone piloting, medical visualizations, manufacturing... but this headset
is not powerful enough to do any of those. It's clear that the #1 use case for things
like this is watching porno on an airplane. [Trade-show ambiance in background] it's a
completely different experience from staring at my monitor! I picked this headset not for
its good looks or for its powerful chipset, but for its legitimately exceptional optics.
What's going on here is that the backlight shines through a teeny-tiny LCD panel and projects the
image onto the lens. The optics inside the projector compress that picture down into a
thin bar of light, which reflects off this curved mirror and gets opened back up by this prism.
The end product is a big, crisp see-through picture in a crystal clear lens, which is a
little chunky but still comfortable enough to wear all day. Less light leaving the lens means more
light hitting my eyeballs, and more likes on this video means more... uh... I can't. I can't call to
action today. Like, you folks have already gone, like, above and beyond to get us here. Thank you.
I hacked this hardware so thoroughly that I actually forgot nearly everything I did,
and writing this video was almost like reverse engineering the project
as I rediscovered all the jank. In no particular order, some of the mods include:
I stripped the display modules out of the headset and I ground away the mounting tabs.
I pulled the driver module out of the right side and hooked it up to the display module on the
left side. That's because the motion sensors are on the right side, but I am left eye dominant.
I designed and printed a new monocular enclosure, then mounted it to a pair of
cheapo glasses frames and cut off the excess. I pulled the camera out and I threw it in the
trash because the picture quality is so bad it wasn't even worth building it into the model.
I rooted the Android, I sideloaded google services, and I
used Xposed to tune the UI for wearable use. I removed the onboard GPS chip antenna and
hacked in a powered U.FL port, then hooked it up to a shoulder-mounted active GPS receiver.
Those last two mods were important, because I built this thing to play Ingress, the inscrutable
sci-fi predecessor to Pokemon Go. I even put the Enlightened logo on this side. Death to Smurfs!
Ingress aggressively refused to run on the Moverio - it took a lot of massaging,
but I was able to get Ingress running on this thing, and I got photographic evidence!
Unfortunately, Ingress is unplayable these days, even on devices that are more capable,
and as much as I'd love to pour some bursters out for my homies, the Google gods' decree
is absolute. Side story: I continued to play Ingress, and I met my wife through it. Hi, wife!
The Optigon was kind of useless, but still comfortable enough to wear all day, so it became,
like, a fashion accessory and a conversation piece that I could wear to meetups and hacker cons. The
Optigon lay in its case, sad, lonely, and out of battery. That was, until September 2020. I
was serious about the whole YouTube thing but I could barely remember enough material to record
a single scene. If I wanted any chance to hit a weekly schedule, I needed a teleprompter. What's
funny is that my first thought was to 3D-print a tablet mount that attached to the camera,
but I didn't have a compatible tablet, and I was kind of stumped. I was taking
a shower when I realized that I was literally already wearing a display in, like, every shot.
[Sobbing in the shower] I'm a worm! A cybernetic worm!!
So, before we filmed the "Why are Circuits on Boards" video,
I took my script and I loaded it into the Elegant Teleprompter app. We filmed that episode twice
as fast as the previous two, and the Optigon has been a crucial part of my gear ever since.
I will always have a special place in my heart for head-mounted displays,
and now that I need teleprompting, a display will always have a special place mounted to my head.
But this ain't over. The Optigon looks like it was half-assedly designed in a
drunken weekend on SketchUp by an idiot and made on a 10 year old printer,
because that's exactly how it went down. My viewers deserve better than
this blocky geometry and tacky tribal team tattoos. Oooh, ho, ho, it's project time!
First step was to hunt down the design files on my computer and get them out of that cursed
Sketchup format and into Fusion 360. I just took the dimensions and started from scratch,
and since I was starting from scratch, y'know, might as well redesign the whole thing! Might as
well at this point, right? This original design is compact, but it concentrates all that mass on the hinge of the glasses.
[SMACK!]
That's the furthest point from my face, and the moment of inertia
is significant. I moved the driver board onto the arm of my glasses to shift mass away
from the hinge and closer to my ear. All of the electronics and optics mount to the inner shell,
and the outer shell just slides over it and screws in place. I put this interlocking sawtooth pattern
on the seam to conceal any mess and just make the thing look cooler. The backlight should shine
directly on the driver board, so I added a little window, gaming-PC style, to show off the innards.
Now, to replace that Ingress icon with something more timeless, and nothing
says Optigon like... hexagons. In the future, everything is made of hexagons.
Printing prototypes and refining the design were the easy parts - the hard part was picking a color
scheme. I originally wanted a glow-in-the-dark inner piece and a shiny silk black outer, but that
shiny silk filament was just way too brittle for this design. I switched to PETG, which is tougher than
PLA and also has this gorgeous glossy finish. My 90s instincts roared to life and reminded me that
the color of the future, like the color of my Tamagotchi, is clear. Clear PETG transmits more
light than clear PLA, so once that backlight turns on, things are going to get classy.
[Funky future bass track]
[Wub wub wub wub wub wub]
Wearable computers got me into hacking, and they brought me where I am today.
This project, Optigon, is my way of saying that this story is going to continue
deep into the future. Thanks so much for being part of it, and I will see you there.