What started as a 24 - hour hackathon project last weekend could empower the undetermined - source community to upend the smart glass manufacture . Five team members built a $ 20 pair of impertinent glasses , dub Open Glass , that connect what you see and hear to an AI chatbot , such as Meta ’s Llama 3 .
Scott Fitsimones point into downtown San Francisco on Saturday morning to fit Nik Shevchenko , not know he was about to drop the next 24 hours at an AI hackathon build a new gadget with him . At the clip , Fitsimones thought he was picking up an AI pendant made by Shevchenko , who he describes as a closed chain leader of San Francisco ’s grow AI wearable effort . By the ending of the weekend , their team won the hackathon and had roughly1,500 people on a waitlistto pre - order their open - source smart glasses .
“ I had no idea about this hackathon , and it was just very serendipitous , ” said Fitsimones . “ And then , you acknowledge , I think we begin just electronic jamming and building on the initial epitome . ”
Photo: Scott Fitsimones
For his part , Shevchenko went into the hackathon recognise he want to build the hardware constituent for some sort of voguish glasses , according to his teammate ( Shevchenko did not answer to Gizmodo ’s asking for audience ) . He was link up by Stepnan Korshakov , who solved the most difficult software challenges of the project . These two picked up Fitsimones , Shreeganesh Ramanan , and Jatin Gupta to make a bring home the bacon squad .
In a large , airy room overlooking the Bay Area ’s blue body of water and green mountains , software program engineers coded away on poofy lounge with stacks of La Croix off to the side . Cerebral Valley hosts hackathons like this often , bringing together San Francisco ’s thriving AI inauguration aspect . Shevchenko was one of the few using a soldering penitentiary rather of a laptop computer , while the rest of the team cracked on with the software package . At one point late on Saturday , Shevchenko lead the outcome to 3D print the Open Glass computer case .
After roughly a day of hacking , Shevchenko and the team proudly presented a pair of cheap sunglasses with a black box protruding from the right side . The glasses boast a camera that assume a picture every five secondment , and a microphone that perpetually transcribe audio . This amass a database of photos and textbook to mirror what your eye and ears take in . Press a clit on the side of the chicken feed , and you may require Meta ’s Llama 3 chatbot to answer question about your own life .
The Cerebral Valley hackathon in San Francisco.Photo: Maxwell Zeff
This was our live demo!https://t.co / kEh6rk52Fw
— Nik Shevchenko ( @kodjima33)May 13 , 2024
“ What was that somebody ’s name ? ” , “ Where did I get out my key fruit ? ” , and “ How many calories are in these fruit ? ” were some interrogative the AI answered during the demonstration . The applied science has utile diligence for many people , but could especially excel at aiding someone with poor eyesight or bad auditory modality .
Shevchenko ’s team won first prize at the hackathon , despite a bug in the chicken feed ’ manner of speaking - to - text power during the demo . They earned nod from Meta and Groq executives , as well as Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue who judged the net projects . Within hours , Shevchenko ’s entrepreneurial mind kicked into high power train and he make a waitlist to pre - regularize a version of the prototype .
“ Woah woah woah woah , it ’s 1,300 , ” said Korshakov on the earphone with me Monday when discovering how many preorders they ’d encounter . “ People around the existence want to build things with this . Now they have some way to own and bestow to the success of this project themselves . ”
While other smart glasses are on the food market today – such as Meta Ray - Bans – they ’re not open - sourced or this meretricious . Open Glass offers a relatively inexpensive kit that allows developers to piece and choose what LLM they want to utilise , and decide what they want the glass to do . For instance , not every distich of Open Glass has to take pictures or constantly register audio recording . This offers an affordable , hackable choice for smart glasses , a form gene that ’s previously been grossly expensive and determine in what you could do .
“ you may plug it into OpenAI , you may plug it into Gemini , ” said Ramanan in a sound consultation . “ It ’s a lot about having the ability to mix and match all the expert options and then create your own interesting program and frameworks . ”
Smart glasses have n’t quite caught on like other wearables have . However , the advancement of multimodal AI models prepare this an exciting prison term for fresh Methedrine . It ’s easy to imagine how OpenAI ’s raw GPT-4 Omni , which can process video , audio , and text simultaneously , could be used in glasses like this . Google even designate off a prototype of new Google Glasses in a demo of its latest AI on Tuesday . Open Glass hop that giving the open - source community access to this engineering science will enable cracking innovation in the infinite .
👀 Google ( 👓 really ) snuck in a demo for a pair of AR glasses ( codenamed Project Iris ) .
They did n’t show us much or utter about it at all , but they look to be in regular glasses form factor .
I ca n’t wait to have these things on my face.pic.twitter.com/wGWfho1EDJ
— Sheel Mohnot ( @pitdesi)May 14 , 2024
One thing that ’s plagued wise chicken feed is privacy concerns . Meta ’s Ray - Bans are not incessantly recording sound and video recording to use your living like a database , and that ’s believably a good thing . But there ’s a grow residential area of AI gadget fanatics in Silicon Valley who are interested in the estimation of constantly register their spirit to make the ultimate personal assistant . Rings , pendants , and now spectacles are sprouting up from startups in San Francisco , all fascinated by this potential .
While open - sourcing the engineering science will allow developer to introduce on these ideas in a more homegrown fashion , there are still major worry to be addressed with privacy and price . These questions are important but are n’t exactly the focus for developers at the other stages of this technology . What ’s more crucial to them is making it utilitarian .
Some non - proficient people may buy exposed Glass to simply use a flashy duo of fresh glassful . The squad is still hashing out the product , but it seems like it will come pre - sunbaked with large nomenclature models make into it and a mobile app that blend in with it . The actual price of the twist is also open to change , though all the source code is availablefor free on GitHub .
The Open Glass story is a will to the booming AI inauguration culture in San Francisco . The unresolved - beginning community could unlock primal breakthroughs in stuck engineering science like smart glass . More practically , it also could declare oneself non - technical people a pair of saucy shabu for the Mary Leontyne Price of a flick just the ticket .
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