If you could recreate any of the capabilities of Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit in real life, it would probably be the ability to fly, the super strength, or maybe even the palm-mounted lasers that can cut through whatever obstacle is in your path. But let’s be real, all that stuff is way too hard to try and pull off. Plus you’ll probably just end up accidentally killing yourself in the backyard.
But judging by the videos he’s been posting, [Kris Kersey] is doing one hell of a job creating a functional heads-up display (HUD) similar to the one Tony uses in the films. He’s even building it into a 3D printed Iron Man helmet, with the NVIDIA Jetson board that’s powering the show inside a chest-mounted “Arc Reactor”. He goes into a bit more detail about the project and his goals in an interview recently published on NVIDIA’s own blog.
The HUD shows [Kris] an impressive amount of information, such as his current compass heading, GPS position on a moving map, the tilt angle of his head, and various internal and external temperatures. Perhaps most impressively, it uses the computational power of the Jetson Nano to perform real-time object detection that highlights individuals as they come into his field of view. While that last function doesn’t appear to have a practical application, seeing the HUD rapidly rendering a targeting reticle over each person certainly looks like something out of a sci-fi film.
In the first video below, [Kris] takes the viewer through the process of building and testing the HUD system, which includes plenty of footage recorded through the helmet’s digital eyes. In the second video, he provides an update on the HUD’s performance when he switches out the original NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX board for the newer NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano — which we took a look at back when it released back in March.
This isn’t actually the first time we’ve seen somebody create their own Iron Man helmet with a digital HUD. But with all due respect to those previous attempts, what [Kris] has accomplished here doesn’t just raise the bar — it launches it into orbit.
“or maybe even the palm-mounted lasers that can cut through whatever obstacle is in your path. But let’s be real, all that stuff is way too hard to try and pull off” – Hacksmith gave this a pretty good shot! (Along with a repulsor)
Hacksmith is a hack, all “his” iron man things are just polished up versions of things others have made before & are actually mostly made by his employees 🤷♂️
Same goes for a lot of things they “make”, what they actually seem to do is browse tons of websites to look for cool projects, then see if they can make money off of those idea’s..
Honestly they did used to make cool things themselves, but last few years they just seem to be about getting views and selling random garbage from a project, i feel like its related to some people having left or something, “Hacksmith Industries” today is wildly different compared to a few years ago.
so he’s the (early) bill gates of making?
sometimes all an idea needs is more exposure, he’s filling that void right?
Agree JLaservideo is a much better maker.
As this uses cameras and screens, not see-trough screens. So there is an offset in what you would normally see and see now. As well as eye focusing differences and resolution differences. I wonder if this introduces any motion sickness?
Yes, tha delay seems horrible.
Since the screens are fixed distance and the cameras are a fixed focal length, you have no refocusing issues. It’s just like wearing a VR display. The in-software latency is only 20ms and the real world camera to display latency is only around 80ms. I have no problem wearing the helmet for long periods of time. I have some photos of this I’ve been meaning to post to my socials for a while. Thanks for the questions!
I would think the see-through LCD displays would work quite well here…
Unfortunately, no. A simple transparent display won’t work if it is only an inch in front of your eyes. You still need optics to give your eyes a workable focal length!
kinda off-topic, but cross-eyed Iron Man looks kinda cute :D
löl
What kind of monster has an Nvidia wallpaper on ubuntu?
Awesome project though. Heads-up displays have always been something I’ve anticipated but never arrived.
The prebuilt image for the Jetson has that background on by default.
It’s the wall paper that comes on the Jetson. :-D Thanks!
So he upgraded from a £400 dev kit to a £600 dev kit? Good for him…