The Humane AI Pin was ambitious, expensive, and failed to captivate people between its launch and shutdown shortly after. While the units do contain some interesting elements like the embedded projector, it’s all locked down tight, and the cloud services that tie it all together no longer exist. The devices technically still work, they just can’t do much of anything.
Since then, developers like [Adam Gastineau] have been hard at work turning the device into an experimental development platform: PenumbraOS, which provides a means to allow “untrusted” applications to perform privileged operations.
As announced earlier this month on social media, the experimental SDK lets developers treat the pin as a mostly normal Android device, with the addition of a modular, user-facing assistant app called MABL. [Adam] stresses that this is all highly experimental and has a way to go before it is useful in a user-facing sort of way, but there is absolutely a workable architecture.
When the Humane AI Pin launched, it aimed to compete with smartphones but failed to impress much of anyone. As a result, things folded in record time. Humane’s founders took jobs at HP and buyers were left with expensive paperweights due to the highly restrictive design.
Thankfully, a load of reverse engineering has laid the path to getting some new life out of these ambitious devices. The project could sure use help from anyone willing to pitch in, so if that’s up your alley be sure to join the project; you’ll be in good company.
I’d for sure have a sour taste in my mouth if I’d wasted $700 on an almost immediately defunct brick, but [Adam] said he’s put ~400 hours into this project…
I certainly appreciate the hack and the project from a technical point of view, but it seems so pointless. There’s never going to be another of these pins made, best guess there have only ever been a few thousand of them in the world, and most of them are not going to see this project, their owners are already onto the next big thing.
If this were targeting a product that’s available but restricted I’d be enthusiastic about joining, but this… I’ve never even seen a Humane AI pin in person, and I’m only ever likely to see one in a museum.
While I believe you are correct that it’s generally not worth it to work on a project like this, I didn’t even own an Ai Pin until Humane announced it was shutting down. I like picking a platform and diving deep into it (in the past this has been the Analogue Pocket and Apple Vision Pro), though those platforms have been orders of magnitude more popular than the Ai Pin (which has <1000 units in the wild with our estimations).
Ultimately, I think the hardware is really neat and polished and I’ve wanted something like this since I was a young teen, so when I had the ability to finally build on a similar platform, I jumped on it.
While I would say you’re generally correct, I actually never owned an Ai Pin until Humane announced they were shutting down. I like picking a hardware platform and diving deep on it (previously Analogue Pocket and Apple Vision Pro), though those platforms have orders of magnitude more units out there (we estimate there are <1,000 Ai Pins out in the wild left).
Ultimately this hardware formfactor is something I’ve desired since a young teen, and it has a level of industrial design polish that few devices of this scale have. It was definitely something I wanted to try to mess around with (though obviously spending tens of thousands of dollars of my theoretically “billable” time was not intended. I’m quite aware of how my work is disappearing into the void due to so few possible users, but I mostly don’t care.
I too have long desired something broadly with the capabilities and form factor of the Humane pin, for a few years I was really hoping that Pranav Mistry would actually do something with SixthSense. Though I never purchased a Humane pin because I just won’t buy something that’s entirely reliant on cloud magic.
I definitely appreciate the curiosity and the desire to own the thing, I really do. I’ve purchased defunct things for curiosity and reverse engineering too. I just don’t like to see someone waste so much really good effort. I guess my complaint is sadness because you’ve open sourced your work on the Humane pin (which is good, don’t get me wrong there), but in the same time you could have designed an open source pin and REALLY had something for the future.
Sometimes it takes a techbro blowing a shitload of VC money to get something brought into the world.
400 hours? That seems like more than humane put into it…
Just think with a “pin” this size, everyone would know who their senators were. ;-)
Oh! I saw one of these in the wild here in Japan a while back.
A friend of an aquaintance was visiting and had one.
It seemed to kind of work most of the time, but we were all mostly just ‘meh’ at it. It basically seemed to be a timelapse camera a-la Google Glass crossed with Microsoft Recall but without the glasses and with a crappy monochrome UI that required gestures that sometimes worked.
It seemed like a solution looking for a reason to exist, except for what little it did do, a smartwatch does much more way betterer.
Even if Humane was a mess, I appreciate that there was an attempt.
I find this weird modular lower power format of “personal computing” so much more interesting than smartphones, and it seems like LLMs provide an interface that could make them viable.
I was so sad when the Pebble Core was canceled.
They’re a pretty neat bit of hardware, dumb cloud service aside. Camera, computer, battery, projector, almost like what jobs stupidly thought the first iphones would be like before he realized touchscreens were more practical.
I wouldn’t mind playing around with one of these things. Could probably do some neat stuff with them without all the AI or cloud bullshit. Would be nice if there was a pmOS port to them though. Maybe someone can do a teardown and port it when these things start showing up in dumpsters by the hundred.
I guess this is the hardware hacking circle of life. Some silicon valley techbro has a dumb idea and blows a ton of VC money making a million stupid widgets connected to a cloud service, that service collapses, and people repurpose the free ewaste after.
Except, this one seems to have worked out like google glass, where the hardware was sold for $really_expensive rather than trying to go $razorblade_model, so it might hard to come by as people who bought the things try to “recoup” their “investment.” :/