Have you ever considered getting an augmented reality headset? Were you also wowed at the possibility of augmented reality and looked at the price tag with a broken heart?
Yes, me too!
But that didn't stop me there. I built up my courage and instead, decided to build my own AR headset.
I really felt that augmented reality market is niche and it needs an open market. Makers and developers are the market enablers.
But the problem is that their developer kits are expensive and costs greater than $1000. So a normal maker or developer cannot afford it. So I am building this open source platform for augmented reality on both software and hardware so makers and developers can innovate together on it.
The cost of building this development kit won't cost you more than $20 for a bare minimum design.
So how does the HuD work? High school physics tells you that light reflects on a mirror, refracts on a semitransparent mirror, and passes through a transparent glass. We will be using exactly that principle here.
HOW TO MAKE THE HUD?
Cut the thick polythene sheet into 5 equal square shaped pieces.
Arrange four pieces as a cube with OLED and glue it together.
Fix the light refractor by placing the sixth piece diagonally inside the cube.
Glue it such that one surface is facing the OLED display and the other is facing the side of your eye.
Finally fix the last piece and seal it.
Tadda!! That is your HuD display. So simple!
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Step 2
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OLED Display
I used a Chinese OLED display that works on the SPI bus. It took me almost a day to figure out the data sheet. I found out that the u8lib library is needed to make it work.
Now connect the SPI OLED Display to the SPI pin of the Arduino Nano.
Connect this OLED display with a long wire to fit near your eye for easy view.
Now download the library file and extract it into your Arduino library folder.
Now uncomment the particular OLED driver in the program to enable your OLED Display
Test with different modes in Library Example folder.
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Step 3
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OLED and AR Display
Test the OLED with the AR glass by using the sample code and adjust the display for better viewing experience.
The major problem with this AR display is that we are using a mirror to refract the rays so the image to be displayed, has to be inverted. This requires you to build a library with the inverted alphabet and bitmaps to display it properly.
There are many websites, which converts bitmap into HEX code that can be used directory into the OLED library files.
You can use a small concave lens for better Focal length