Eidos: Audio/Visual Sensory Augmentation

eidos

One of our tipsters led us onto a very cool project by a British university team — It’s called Eidos, and it’s a real-time audio and visual augmentation system.

The creators embarked on this design journey after wondering if there was a way they could control and tune their senses. Imagine Superman and his ability to pick out one voice out of thousand — with this technology, it could be possible.

The clunky white goggles shown in the image above is the concept behind the visual augmentation. It’s akin to long-exposure photography, except that it is in real-time and is fluid video. We’re not sure how this could help anyone, but we have to admit it would be pretty cool to play around with. Maybe if Google Glass ever came out someone could write an app for it to mimic this!

The second device can target your hearing to a specific person in a noisy environment, zoning out all the unnecessary distractions. This could be very helpful for people suffering from attention deficit disorders, although we must imagine it would be very strange to get used to. Can you imagine blocking out everything and only looking at a person’s face and listening to their voice?

Unfortunately there is not much information about the actual tech or software behind these devices or if they even in fact work, but the concept was so interesting we just had to share it. Stick around after the break to see a video explanation and demonstration of the proposed technology.

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Google Glass Controlled Quadcopter

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For some reason this project makes us think of the Dog Pog Grid from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. It’s not that there’s a ton of drones floating around this guy, it’s that he’s got one which looks like it’s his bodyguard and is controlled by the Google Glass he wears on his head. The future is now!

We find the metamorphosis of this project interesting as well. It started as a Leap motion controlled rover project. We saw a similar hack just the other day that paired a Leap Motion with a Hexapod. But [Blaine] wasn’t satisfied with that. Having had a taste for alternate control inputs he dug in and got to work making Google Glass the control interface. But the problem with moving your head to control a rover is that you can’t actually see it because looking down would cause unwanted motion. His solution was to transition to a quadcopter, which will hover at eye level when he’s looking right at it. Glass is sending raw sensor data to a server, which does the translation to control commands for the quadcopter.

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Google Glass Hack For Apple Fanboys Can Be Had Right Now

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If you’re a follower of Apple hardware the upcoming Google Glass release probably doesn’t interest you much. But the concept is universally cool. If you want to have your own one-eyed voice-activated computer running iOS, then this is the hack for you. [John] calls it the Beady-i, and posted a step-by-step article on how he put it together.

The headpiece is shown on the left. It’s a combination of a pair of glasses with projection screens built-in, and a gaming headset. [John] cut off one of the lenses, and removed the remaining arm of the glasses. That arm was replaced with the frame of a gaming headset, which now wraps around the back of his neck to make sure the lopsided display isn’t going to fall off.

By combining the electronics from both the glasses and the headset, and terminating the connections with a docking plug he’s got what he was after. The lens displays what is shown on the screen, and the gaming headset lets him hear the device’s sound in one ear and register input using the microphone.