Reverse Engineering Solos Smart Glasses
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
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Reverse EngineeringSmart GlassesWearable Technology
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Reverse Engineering
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Wearable Technology
The author reverse-engineered Solos smart glasses, a discontinued product, and shared their findings, sparking discussion on potential uses and limitations of the technology.
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Now, I don't know what it does that my $40 smart watch doesn't do, by passing my voice to google / alexa / <choice>. I like where this is going, I just don't think that this generation has even the same features, as what I carry on my wrist, sadly.
Sure, the high end options from apple and garmin can show maps, but you are always going to have to take a hand off the handlebar to have a good look at that tiny screen (that's why cyclists spend up to 1000$ on garmin bike computers).
There's certainly a market for a lightweight HUD and i am pretty sure some company like xreal will eventually have another shot at it.
As an avid cyclist I never felt the need for this, my cycle computer has everything I need at a glance anyways. But I've seen some similar googles for skiing or swimming, which I might check out more. The skiing one is mostly vanity (like knowing my speed and other stats in the moment is not that useful), but the swimming one is nice as it's hard to track how you're doing without glancing at your watch. Anyone else have experience with these kind of devices?
I've used and enjoyed Form goggles for swimming, but their subscription model is not to my liking.
I don’t have a pair of these Solos glasses (yet) but it looks from specs their resolution and display quality is much higher compared to Engo 2, obviously because it’s an actual microled display not prisms or waveguides.
This part:
The one thing I’m left scratching my head over is the length field. If I have 0x20 bytes of image data to send over, I actually need to put 0x10 into that field.
Made me think the protocol simply assumes at least 2 bytes will always be used, so it transmits the length using the unit of 16-bit "words" instead of bytes. That would not be unheard of, and is kind of smart even.
Probably the leading current product if you want HUD Bluetooth glasses are Even Realities G1s but those aren’t going to do images however they have very crisp and useable monochrome displays for text.
Given how this is sort of software is usually written, my guess would be they originally didn't have the RLE encoding and were just sending (rgb565:u16)*. That'd explain it.
https://store.vufine.com/products/vufine-wearable-display-1
It's a wearable version of the clockwork orange movie player! Or maybe the parallax view.
For such a low cost I'm tempted to order one.
Improvement would be to send number of RLE datas (number of 3 byte quantities)
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