Aero Glass is still out there...

[AggieMike88]

http://glass.aero/shop/

AERO GLASS
NEWSLETTER #NOVEMBER '15

We're back! OK, that's not entirely true: we've been here all along, although somewhat invisible immersed in our skunkworks project - apart from a few tech event appearances. We, at Aero Glass, are ever so grateful for your patience; we know you must have been wondering about the long radio silence. We hope this update answers your questions, but if you have anything left to ask us by the end of this, don’t hesitate to let us know. Let's catch you up, shall we?


Where we stand

* Development status

Part of our silence was due to the fact that we’ve been concentrating on solving issues with head tracking. As you’re aware of the Beta program, gyro drift was a serious problem we had to improve on. During the past 9 months, we’ve done serious research on how to tackle this problem, involving scientists from various universities. The solution to this challenge lies beyond the use of gyros, and gyro drift will always be with us. We’ll share with you how the real solution looks like in the coming months


* EU funds and new colleagues

Good news is we have finally tanked up on avgas - i.e. Aero Glass won EU funds in the frame of the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument programme - and this will help us continue to expand our team dedicated to development tasks and hopefully speed up our progress over the next 2 years. Two developers joined us in October and two more will arrive in November - you'll be able to read more abut them on the website soon. Plus, we also have Eszter aboard, who'll help us keep you better informed, since we'd loathe to leave you without news for so long again. No radio silence from now on.

* New co-founder

On top of this all, our pool of expertise has just grown thanks to the brainpower of Professor Oliver Bimber, head of the Institute of Computer Graphics at Johannes Kepler University Linz and (co-)author of several spatial AR-themed publications, who has joined Aero Glass as co-founder. Check out his profile on our team page.


* Spreading the word

Our team members attended a number of tech and aviation events (like the International Paris Air Show in June) to introduce Aero Glass, build in-trade connections and meet you.. Ákos Maróy showcased Aero Glass at the Osterhout Design Group stand at the Augmented World Expo 2015 in Silicon Valley held June 8-10, 2015, using a 180 degree 3D realistic panoramic simulator by SimPit Technologies.

Most recently, Jeffrey Johnson spoke at Qualcomm Institute’s The Future of Virtual Reality Conference 2015 in San Diego on 9 September, while Ákos spoke about how augmented reality enhances aviation safety by reducing pilot workload at AeroDays2015, the European flagship event in aviation research and innovation in London on 21 September.

What’s next

*Product future

As we’ve mentioned, we are now (and for a while will continue to be) in the process of developing a new solution for the challenge of head tracking. If everything progresses optimally, we’ll be releasing a new beta in the spring of 2016. Some of you might have already heard the new release will require a switch of platform: it will run on the state-of-the-art R-7 Smart Glasses by the Osterhout Design Group for both development and UX reasons. We understand that this might be inconvenient for you, since you already paid for the Epson BT-200, but although it was the best available option a year ago, ODG’s R-7 has taken over that position since. R-7 is one of the top head-worn-devices on the market, and it is faster, lighter, more powerful and overall more advanced than the Epson. You cannot have a leading edge solution, without a leading edge device.

Our pursuit of delivering the optimum solution does not end here. We have joined forces with the prize-winning creative studio Igen Design, who will give an industrial design facelift to the AeroGlass product package, plus we are also upping our UX game via a cooperation with the world's largest, fully accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace, Embry Riddle Aeronautical University (Florida, US). The latter working relationship is expected to help us perfect Aero Glass’ symbology - that is the symbols marking the various objects in your view in Aero Glass.


* Join the team!

And last, but not least, you can also be part of innovation history! Are you an Android / OpenGL ES developer, based in the EU? We are looking for someone who can join our dev team in our Budapest office and help us create cutting edge Augmented Reality solutions. Benefits include massages and test flights. Check out our job offers here and please, recommend us if you know the right person.

* Thank you!

But really we’d like to thank you again for your dedication and patience. Aero Glass is our shared passion and we continue to work hard to create and deliver the best AR aerial navigation solution possible to you. We look forward to your inquiries and insights, both of which have the power to inspire us, and - we cannot stress this enough - are of immense help.


* Meet us

We encourage you to visit us to exchange ideas and experiences whenever we’re attending the same tech or aviation event - we’ll keep you posted on these. Until then, please, stay tuned and watch this space, the Aero Glass blog and our social media outlets for more about the vision that we hope we'll enhance your vision one day. (And about this turbulent flight getting there.)

 

[happypilot876]

The helmet in the JSF (featuring the 360 "virtual" view) costs over $400,000, in no small part of the technology necessary to avoid latency and head tracking issues.

Granted, those jets fly in a more challenging environment than GA planes, but I find it hard to believe that even a 100x cost reduction would be possible, and I can't imagine that this would be competitive in GA $4000. MAYBE if they got the price to under 1 AMU, but I think that's even more unlikely than this ever getting to the point of usable hardware.

 

[Henning]

The helmet in the JSF (featuring the 360 "virtual" view) costs over $400,000, in no small part of the technology necessary to avoid latency and head tracking issues.

Granted, those jets fly in a more challenging environment than GA planes, but I find it hard to believe that even a 100x cost reduction would be possible, and I can't imagine that this would be competitive in GA $4000. MAYBE if they got the price to under 1 AMU, but I think that's even more unlikely than this ever getting to the point of usable hardware.

The cost comes from figuring out how, then adding on Military Industrial Complex pricing and service branch construction durability spec, and a consumer line durability technology follow on model I would expect to be 100x less. Once the logic circuits are in place, the natural progression of the industry will be to become cheaper and faster as the supporting hardware technology improves and optimizes.

 

[bullwinkle]

Not sure of that math, I can buy a toilet seat for considerably less than $10,000...

 

[petrolero]

The cost comes from figuring out how, then adding on Military Industrial Complex pricing and service branch construction durability spec, and a consumer line durability technology follow on model I would expect to be 100x less. Once the logic circuits are in place, the natural progression of the industry will be to become cheaper and faster as the supporting hardware technology improves and optimizes.

Yep.

We don't need a helmet, just glasses. We don't need combat durability or reliability, just normal use.

There's a way to get this done for the GA market as long as it doesn't require FAA certification. If it did, it would die a slow costly death. FAA certification is the graveyard of ideas.

 

[petrolero]

I love the Kim Jong Il look of those new glasses.

To be honest, though, the Epson BT-200s never fit right anyway. They screen always sat way too low in my field of vision. They never fixed that for me, either. I had to take the temples off my ears and slide them down to about the middle of my ear in order to bring the screen "up" to where it actually sat at or partially above & below the actual horizon. At one point they talked about 3D printing me some custom temples but no one followed through because (I assume) they had bigger problems with head tracking.

I still think this concept is fantastic and holds a lot of potential. I am glad they haven't given up and are continuing the research.

 

[Henning]

Yep.

We don't need a helmet, just glasses. We don't need combat durability or reliability, just normal use.

There's a way to get this done for the GA market as long as it doesn't require FAA certification. If it did, it would die a slow costly death. FAA certification is the graveyard of ideas.

It may be the graveyard of avionics startups, but the ideas seem to actually thrive quite well at the GA level of the FAA. Look at SVT. Yeah, Green Mountain died, but the ideas lived on and are now part of pretty much every certified GA aircraft in production and is starting to make inroads into the world of heavy iron.

 

[MAKG1]

Yep.

We don't need a helmet, just glasses. We don't need combat durability or reliability, just normal use.

There's a way to get this done for the GA market as long as it doesn't require FAA certification. If it did, it would die a slow costly death. FAA certification is the graveyard of ideas.

You don't need reliability?

I gotta see you hold a heading while puking your guts out.

That's what tracking devices look like when they are "unreliable." They lag and you puke.

 

[petrolero]

It may be the graveyard of avionics startups, but the ideas seem to actually thrive quite well at the GA level of the FAA. Look at SVT. Yeah, Green Mountain died, but the ideas lived on and are now part of pretty much every certified GA aircraft in production and is starting to make inroads into the world of heavy iron.

I don't have certified SVT. I don't have a G500. That's because it costs so bloody much to get it certified. I'd love to have a G3X touch, but it's not certified. That hyperspace leap from experimental to certified adds little more than cost.

I do have an uncertified iPad with SVT, however.

So sure the idea may survive but in order to live on in certified aircraft it has to take on the price of certification. And many ideas and airframes die in that process.

 

[Henning]

You don't need reliability?

I gotta see you hold a heading while puking your guts out.

That's what tracking devices look like when they are "unreliable." They lag and you puke.

I think he meant reliable as in being able to take battle damage and continue to function. In this context reliability doesn't matter because you can take the thing off and still be fully capable. If the thing starts screwing up, I can take it off before it makes me puke.

 

[MAKG1]

If the thing starts screwing up, I can take it off before it makes me puke.

Speaking from a decade or so of experience, maybe but I doubt it.

Turning green is how you'll notice it's screwing up. You'll have unexplained nausea or fatigue that you may or may not be able to correlate to head motions.

Trust me, you don't want to "cheap out" on things like this. You want them to work well in a moving environment, not "good enough in the shop."

 

[Henning]

I don't have certified SVT. I don't have a G500. That's because it costs so bloody much to get it certified. I'd love to have a G3X touch, but it's not certified. That hyperspace leap from experimental to certified adds little more than cost.

I do have an uncertified iPad with SVT, however.

So sure the idea may survive but in order to live on in certified aircraft it has to take on the price of certification. And many ideas and airframes die in that process.

Well, that's a function of a market economy, the FAA just plays its assigned roll in managing liability for the insurance market. The FAA doesn't set the standards, they enforce them. Industry sets them through Congress.

 

[petrolero]

You don't need reliability?

I gotta see you hold a heading while puking your guts out.

That's what tracking devices look like when they are "unreliable." They lag and you puke.

Did you even read my post? It's pretty clear what I mean, since I wrote it this way:

We don't need a helmet, just glasses. We don't need combat durability or reliability, just normal use.

Normal use, to me, would include the expected functionality... and not puking my guts out. Christ.

 

[MAKG1]

Did you even read my post? It's pretty clear what I mean, since I wrote it this way:

Normal use, to me, would include the expected functionality... and not puking my guts out. Christ.

There isn't anywhere near as much difference between "combat" reliability and "normal" reliability as you think.

 

[Henning]

Speaking from a decade or so of experience, maybe but I doubt it.

Turning green is how you'll notice it's screwing up. You'll have unexplained nausea or fatigue that you may or may not be able to correlate to head motions.

Trust me, you don't want to "cheap out" on things like this. You want them to work well in a moving environment, not "good enough in the shop."

As a lifelong seaman, I am quite in tune with these functions and my ability to block the effects of disparate sensory input alignment. The only thing that makes me puke anymore is days of pounding into the sea. Rolling around in a visually stable engine room doesn't even phase me, hasn't for a long time.

You're right that you want it to be right for sure, however now that it has been done right, repeating that will become simpler, cheaper, and more reliable as technology progresses. Quantum processors will likely provide a path for simplified problem resolution in the future.

 

[petrolero]

There isn't anywhere near as much difference between "combat" reliability and "normal" reliability as you think.

Says you. But would you say that either one includes "puking your guts out?"



Anyway my comment was in relation to the fact the JSF helmet costs (says here) $400k and is... a helmet. As far as I know, all fighter jocks wear helmets because a) they are ready for combat and require some degree of protection, and b) helmets are durable enough to keep the internal electronics working reliably when in combat.

AeroGlass is goggles, not a helmet. We don't require combat-level durability and combat-level reliability. That means I don't need AeroGlass to stop shrapnel or withstand +8g or protect my head in an ejection or any number of other mil requirements. I just need it to work in a GA airplane.

So yes, there are many orders of magnitude of differences between a combat helmet and a set of consumer AR goggles.

 

[MAKG1]

You're speaking about durability and additional requirements, not reliability.

And no military designer would insist that a pair of goggles stop shrapnel or protect the user in an ejection.

You can dispute an engineer in design if you want, but it's pretty clear you haven't worked in specifications, and you're doing that based on misconceptions.

Making a hardened helmet is easy. It's been done, and it can be taken off the shelf.

Making a low latency tracking system that doesn't make people puke is not easy. That's going to be the same issue for military and civilian use, and it's where the cost is going to be. These systems have been in the civilian world for 30+ years, so don't assume they are going to get cheaper. So far, the ones that actually work are excessively expensive, and the ones that aren't that expensive make people puke even in stationary environments.

 

[AggieMike88]

I still think this concept is fantastic and holds a lot of potential. I am glad they haven't given up and are continuing the research.

That's my take. I'm hopeful something like this comes to market in a reliable form and at a decent price point. But that might be 3-5 years out.

But waiting is cool... look where we've come in the 5 years since the iPads hit the market.

 

[Henning]

That's my take. I'm hopeful something like this comes to market in a reliable form and at a decent price point. But that might be 3-5 years out.

But waiting is cool... look where we've come in the 5 years since the iPads hit the market.

Look at any field of technology.

 

[AggieMike88]

Look at any field of technology.

Yup!!