These Smart Glasses Can Selectively Block Out Bright Spots of Light
Nick Bild created a pair of smart glasses that selectively filter out excessively bright spots from a wearer's field of vision.
Sunglasses are great for dimming everything in your view, but don’t help much when only portions of your view are bright. Either they’re so dark that they make the low-brightness portions of your view impossible to see, or they aren’t dark enough to actually stop the bright spots from blinding you. In either scenario, you wind up unable to see anything. These "Light Brakes" smart glasses, created by Nick Bild, are different, and can selectively dim just the bright spots.
These glasses may not look like something from Gucci, but the idea behind them is quite interesting. LCD displays can be transparent, but they usually aren’t because they have a backlight or some sort of contrasting material behind them. The actual LCD screen, however, remains transparent until a pixel is turned on. It is therefore possible to use LCD screens like digital blinds. In fact, some exotic car windows do exactly that. But those usually turn on all of the pixels in order to completely dim the entire window. These smart glasses only turn on the pixels where there is a bright spot of light.
Bild accomplished that by using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ with a Raspberry Pi Camera v2 to analyze the wearer’s field of view. It uses OpenCV computer vision software to process images in real-time and determine where the bright spots are. Those are translated into rough X and Y coordinates, which are used to decide which pixels on the transparent LCD screens to turn on. An LCD screen is positioned over each eye, so the activated pixels block those bright spots. It’s doubtful that anyone would wear these smart sunglasses out on the town as they are, but they do have potential if the hardware can be refined to make it more compact and sleek.