I own an Epson Moverio, which the Meta 1 glasses appear to be based on. I have a small bit of firsthand experience with hacking on it to do ARish things.
* The Moverio consists of two parts, the glasses and the control box. The two connect via a seemingly proprietary connector. The control box runs Android 2.2, archaic by today's standards. USB host mode was introduced in Android 3.1, so there would be no straightforward way to feed the depth camera's information into the control box.
* Unity3D, which Meta's software stack claims to be using, does run on the control box once you output your Unity project to an Android application. For the app to run, I had to tweak the build settings to support both ARMv6 and ARMv7 (The app failed to start when built for ARMv7 only). This was doable in Unity 3.5.x. However, Unity 4 removes support for ARMv6.
So I'm full of question marks:
* Did the Meta team somehow obtain/reverse-engineer the specifications for the Moverio glasses' connector, plug it into a more powerful device, and ditch the control box?
* Did the Meta team replace the Moverio control box's OS with a more modern version?
* Is Meta 1 stuck with the older Unity 3.5.x?
* Or am I doing it wrong, and is it indeed possible to run Unity 4-built apps on the Moverio control box?
Also, other have mentioned but the field of view is disappointingly small with this device - just a small window in in the middle of your view.
Ah, I see. If so, how did you guys manage to connect the Moverio's glasses to an x86 PC? IIRC the glasses use a proprietary connector, and no info on the specs/protocol of the connector (nor the Aux connector on the back of the control box) is publicly available.
Did you guys receive the specs from Epson directly, receive dev glasses which doesn't use that connector, or reverse-engineer it yourselves? Is that information confidential or under NDA?
I strongly feel that ancient control box is holding back the full potential of the glasses and would love to connect different hardware to it. The connector spec/protocol is the only thing preventing that. I'm not very hopeful but if there's any information on it I would love to know.
* The Moverio consists of two parts, the glasses and the control box. The two connect via a seemingly proprietary connector. The control box runs Android 2.2, archaic by today's standards. USB host mode was introduced in Android 3.1, so there would be no straightforward way to feed the depth camera's information into the control box.
* Unity3D, which Meta's software stack claims to be using, does run on the control box once you output your Unity project to an Android application. For the app to run, I had to tweak the build settings to support both ARMv6 and ARMv7 (The app failed to start when built for ARMv7 only). This was doable in Unity 3.5.x. However, Unity 4 removes support for ARMv6.
So I'm full of question marks:
* Did the Meta team somehow obtain/reverse-engineer the specifications for the Moverio glasses' connector, plug it into a more powerful device, and ditch the control box?
* Did the Meta team replace the Moverio control box's OS with a more modern version?
* Is Meta 1 stuck with the older Unity 3.5.x?
* Or am I doing it wrong, and is it indeed possible to run Unity 4-built apps on the Moverio control box?
Also, other have mentioned but the field of view is disappointingly small with this device - just a small window in in the middle of your view.
Overall, confused.