[Mechanical keyboard clacking] [SPROING!] [smash!] [Triumphant marching-band music] Ladies, gentlemen, and cyborgs... we did it! Voidstar Lab has officially joined the four-digit
club! We beat the odds, we did the impossible, we got to 1000 subscribers without a pillow shaped
like a subscribe button! As a tribute to YOU, the handsomest and most intellectual audience on
YouTube, I'm going to acknowledge the elephant on my face. This wearable computer has appeared in
all but one of my videos, and that video was bad. That wasn't a coincidence, because the Optigon
isn't a prop. I'm wearing a fully-functional heads-up display that I use as a teleprompter,
and if you don't believe me, get in my eyeball. Welcome to my left eyeball! As you can see,
this is a transparent display about the size of an iPad held at arm's length. It's a lot like
a Google Glass except it's positioned in front of my eye and the picture is about four times larger.
Unlike a Glass, the Optigon doesn't have a camera. Also, the thing on my face is just
the display; the computer part of the wearable computer is this belt pack.
It's basically a screenless Android tablet. So, how did I make this thing, and
how did it end up on my face? Why does every episode of Voidstar
Lab feature a wearable computer? Well, my story begins like all epics
of the modern era - as an intern. The year is 2007 and I still thought
I could pass engineering school. I had a summer job working for an entrepreneur
named [in enthusiastic British accent] Simon Buckingham. I'm not making fun of him -
that's actually how he introduced himself. I was ghostwriting a blog post and I ended up
on Hackaday. This guy discovered that a $25 replacement headset from a Wild Planet spy car
was super-easy to turn into a wearable computer. I thought this was the coolest thing ever, AND
the headset was in stock, AND it was on sale! My finger circled the 'Buy' button
like a shark around a tender baby. You see, my previous hack, a Nerf ammo counter,
turned out to be a hot-sauce diarrhea dump, and I wasn't exactly confident that I
COULD finish an electronics project. I decided to take the responsible choice and think
about it til I got home. So as soon as I arrived, I jumped on the Wild Planet website and discovered
that Hackaday readers had hoovered up every single damn headset. I even called the Wild
Planet warehouse to beg for spares, but some Fart-Suckerberg had beaten me to it and cleaned
them out. A normie would have stopped here, but by Jove, I was a nerd, and I wanted to
stick a computer on my face. It was ON. I settled on the Vuzix iWear AV230 as the
display, an Arduino Uno as the brains, and a coat hanger as the headset. Yeah, an
Arduino! The Vuzix had a 320x240 resolution, but the Arduino couldn't buffer a single monochrome
frame. It was a terrible choice! But despite not knowing anything about soldering, electronics,
or really anything of relevance to the project, I did manage to finish a functional wearable
computer. Literally immediately, I wore it to the New Jersey Tech Meetup. They were doing some
sort of best-pitch award that night, and my new cybernetic augmentations gave me an insurmountable
edge. So this guy Bert sees my heads-up display, asks me if I want to join a hackerspace. I don't
know what a hackerspace is, so I say hell yeah! It turns out he was actually FOUNDING a
hackerspace, so yeah, we made a hackerspace. They somehow got Eben Upton, the guy who invented
the Raspberry Pi, to go to the hackerspace and do a meet-and-greet. I wanted to show off, so I
bought a new video headset, the MyVu Crystal, I unbent another coat hanger, and I
built another improved heads-up display to connect to a Raspberry Pi. Eben loved
the project, he signed the Pi, and I have cherished that ever since. [Sheepishly] It is my
personal favorite single board computer. [Cough] Then, a well-known tech company released a
wearable computer and I threw myself on that bandwagon face-first. [Google Glass camera
shutter sound] Around that time, I started building prototypes and I formed Voidstar
Lab. One client wanted an augmented-reality bike helmet and we built it around an
off-the-shelf video headset made by Epson. I liked the Moverio so much that it inspired
another wearable, the Optigon, which is what you see here. Actually, all of my wearables are
called Optigon because I am profoundly uncreative. If you have another name idea that doesn't
involve Dragonball, put it in a comment. The Moverio series are Android-based
video headsets. Epson's marketing features first-person drone piloting, medical
visualizations, manufacturing... but this headset is not powerful enough to do any of those.
It's clear that the #1 use case for things like this is watching porno on an airplane.
[Trade-show ambiance in background] it's a completely different experience from staring
at my monitor! I picked this headset not for its good looks or for its powerful chipset,
but for its legitimately exceptional optics. What's going on here is that the backlight shines
through a teeny-tiny LCD panel and projects the image onto the lens. The optics inside the
projector compress that picture down into a thin bar of light, which reflects off this curved
mirror and gets opened back up by this prism. The end product is a big, crisp see-through
picture in a crystal clear lens, which is a little chunky but still comfortable enough to wear
all day. Less light leaving the lens means more light hitting my eyeballs, and more likes on this
video means more... uh... I can't. I can't call to action today. Like, you folks have already gone,
like, above and beyond to get us here. Thank you. I hacked this hardware so thoroughly that
I actually forgot nearly everything I did, and writing this video was almost
like reverse engineering the project as I rediscovered all the jank. In no
particular order, some of the mods include: I stripped the display modules out of the
headset and I ground away the mounting tabs. I pulled the driver module out of the right side
and hooked it up to the display module on the left side. That's because the motion sensors are
on the right side, but I am left eye dominant. I designed and printed a new monocular
enclosure, then mounted it to a pair of cheapo glasses frames and cut off the excess.
I pulled the camera out and I threw it in the trash because the picture quality is so bad it
wasn't even worth building it into the model. I rooted the Android, I sideloaded google services, and I used Xposed to tune the UI for wearable use.
I removed the onboard GPS chip antenna and hacked in a powered U.FL port, then hooked it
up to a shoulder-mounted active GPS receiver. Those last two mods were important, because I
built this thing to play Ingress, the inscrutable sci-fi predecessor to Pokemon Go. I even put the
Enlightened logo on this side. Death to Smurfs! Ingress aggressively refused to run on
the Moverio - it took a lot of massaging, but I was able to get Ingress running on
this thing, and I got photographic evidence! Unfortunately, Ingress is unplayable these
days, even on devices that are more capable, and as much as I'd love to pour some bursters
out for my homies, the Google gods' decree is absolute. Side story: I continued to play
Ingress, and I met my wife through it. Hi, wife! The Optigon was kind of useless, but still
comfortable enough to wear all day, so it became, like, a fashion accessory and a conversation piece
that I could wear to meetups and hacker cons. The Optigon lay in its case, sad, lonely, and out
of battery. That was, until September 2020. I was serious about the whole YouTube thing but I
could barely remember enough material to record a single scene. If I wanted any chance to hit a
weekly schedule, I needed a teleprompter. What's funny is that my first thought was to 3D-print
a tablet mount that attached to the camera, but I didn't have a compatible tablet,
and I was kind of stumped. I was taking a shower when I realized that I was literally
already wearing a display in, like, every shot. [Sobbing in the shower]
I'm a worm! A cybernetic worm!! So, before we filmed the "Why
are Circuits on Boards" video, I took my script and I loaded it into the Elegant
Teleprompter app. We filmed that episode twice as fast as the previous two, and the Optigon
has been a crucial part of my gear ever since. I will always have a special place in
my heart for head-mounted displays, and now that I need teleprompting, a display will
always have a special place mounted to my head. But this ain't over. The Optigon looks
like it was half-assedly designed in a drunken weekend on SketchUp by an idiot
and made on a 10 year old printer, because that's exactly how it went
down. My viewers deserve better than this blocky geometry and tacky tribal
team tattoos. Oooh, ho, ho, it's project time! First step was to hunt down the design files
on my computer and get them out of that cursed Sketchup format and into Fusion 360. I just
took the dimensions and started from scratch, and since I was starting from scratch, y'know,
might as well redesign the whole thing! Might as well at this point, right? This original design is compact, but it concentrates all that mass on the hinge of the glasses. [SMACK!] That's the furthest
point from my face, and the moment of inertia is significant. I moved the driver board
onto the arm of my glasses to shift mass away from the hinge and closer to my ear. All of the
electronics and optics mount to the inner shell, and the outer shell just slides over it and screws
in place. I put this interlocking sawtooth pattern on the seam to conceal any mess and just make the
thing look cooler. The backlight should shine directly on the driver board, so I added a little
window, gaming-PC style, to show off the innards. Now, to replace that Ingress icon with
something more timeless, and nothing says Optigon like... hexagons. In the
future, everything is made of hexagons. Printing prototypes and refining the design were
the easy parts - the hard part was picking a color scheme. I originally wanted a glow-in-the-dark
inner piece and a shiny silk black outer, but that shiny silk filament was just way too brittle for this
design. I switched to PETG, which is tougher than PLA and also has this gorgeous glossy finish. My
90s instincts roared to life and reminded me that the color of the future, like the color of my
Tamagotchi, is clear. Clear PETG transmits more light than clear PLA, so once that backlight
turns on, things are going to get classy. [Funky future bass track] [Wub wub wub wub wub wub] Wearable computers got me into hacking,
and they brought me where I am today. This project, Optigon, is my way of saying
that this story is going to continue deep into the future. Thanks so much for
being part of it, and I will see you there.
