NASA Will Be Taking The ODG Augmented Reality Glasses Into Space
[Phil Lelyveld comment: ODG is visiting the ETC, and may loan us some of their AR glasses for demonstration and experimentation.]
NASA is teaming up with military tech company Osterhout Design Group (ODG) to bring augmented reality into space.
ODG’s glasses include a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and sensors for figuring out where the user is looking.
The main use would be sending instructions straight to the user’s eye for maintaining and repairing equipment on space shuttles instead of having to carry around stacks of index cards. That would free up the astronaut’s hands. The glasses could also send live video feed back to someone who is knowledgable about a piece of equipment and send audio or visual instructions to the wearer of the smart glasses. Doing this could potentially cut down on the enormous amount of time astronauts have to spend on the ground training for missions to space.
*** Several years ago, NASA even approached Google about using Glass for space exploration when the headworn device was first launched but was turned away by the project lead then, Babak Parviz, a former Google X director now at Amazon. Instead, Google told NASA it was focusing exclusively on the consumer market. ***
NASA also recently announced a partnership with Microsoft’s own augmented reality specs, HoloLens. But at this point, the partnership is more around remotely controlling the Mars Curiosity rover from Earth. It looks like ODG may beat Microsoft into space.
Read the full story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2015/03/11/nasa-odg-augmented-reality-in-space/