Teemu Laurila's Raspberry Pi Smart Glasses Include a Camera for Video Streaming, Gesture Control
A work-in-progress, these 3D-printed smart glasses can stream video to a more powerful host system for gesture recognition work.
Finnish maker Teemu Laurila has released design files for 3D-printed smart glasses powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless single-board computer, offering 60Hz video and a Debian Linux base on which to build wearable projects.
"This is a pair of smart glasses that I designed, because all of the current versions were derivatives from the Arduino smart glass project," Laurila explains. "This can do 60Hz on a 240x240 IPS display and obviously runs Debian (Raspbian) so you can do pretty much anything you like with this!"
The build released this week is version 2.0 of the project, adding a previously-missing piece of hardware: An on-board camera. "The 2.0 (this model) has a camera," says Laurila, "so you can do hand tracking and cool stuff like that (but you probably need to do the computation elsewhere)."
"This model still has some problems, like a bit too much weight, not enough brightness (if you look at a light source you can't see the image) and too little RAM (the Raspberry Pi Zero W has only 512MB of it), but it's a really good foundation if you are looking to build your own smart glasses."
To prove the concept, Laurila wrote a Python program which streams video from the smart glasses to a host computer for gesture recognition then sends processed images back to the smart glasses. Combined with a second piece of Python designed for gesture control of room lights connected to an Arduino microcontroller, it's the basis for a gesture control system for smart homes and more.
Laurila has published the design files under a permissive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license on Thingiverse, with full details available in his YouTube video.
