Building E.D.I.T.H.-Style Smartglasses for Under $40
Abrar Fairuj wanted his own E.D.I.T.H.-style smartglasses without the high price of Google Glass, so he built his own for less than $40.
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, E.D.I.T.H. (Even Dead, I'm The Hero) is an artificial intelligence system created by Tony Stark and given to Peter Park in the form of a pair of smartglasses. While this is pure science fiction, similar smartglasses do exist in the real world. One example is the infamous Google Glass device, which saw little success due to controversial privacy issues, an unfashionable presentation, and high prices. But Abrar Fairuj wanted his own E.D.I.T.H.-style smartglasses without the high price, so he built his own for less than $40.
These smartglasses provide both a visual and auditory interface with an artificially intelligent personal assistant. That assistant runs on a smartphone and is similar to Siri, so the smartphone is doing most of the heavy processing. That helped keep the cost of the smartglasses down, since they don't need to run anything too resource intensive. A Raspberry Pi Zero built into the smartglasses handles the modest processing requirements, as well as microphone input and PWM speaker output. It connects to the smartphone through a mini USB dongle and to the internet through a mini WiFi dongle.
The biggest challenge with smartglasses like these is the projection system. You can't simply place a screen in front of the user's eye, because it will be too close to focus on. That's why Fairuj mounted a small OLED screen to the frame of the smartglasses. That reflects off of a flat transparent lens in front the user's eye, effectively tripling the distance from screen to pupil and allowing the user to focus on the screen content. The Raspberry Pi listens to the user through a small microphone and parses their speech using Google's Diagflow natural language processing system. It then feeds commands to the smartphone via Bluetooth and either displays the results on the screen or outputs them through the speaker.
These may not look as sleek as the E.D.I.T.H. smartglasses you've seen on screen, but this is Fairuj's first prototype and he plans to improve the design in future iterations. Even as it stands, this is an impressive accomplishment considering the miniscule budget he had to work with.