A Real Life HUD: The Vuzix Raptyr

The one gadget that I want above all others and it is very simple, but extremely powerful.  All of these monitors and screens and gadgets in our life could be replaced with the single gadget that would rule them all, a wearable HUD.  Personally, I'm not interested in the hardware as long as it works, but once it is out there it will be impossible to prevent me from developing software for a functional HUD.

There have been some baby steps towards creating a HUD, but it looks like some major progress was announced at CES 2011.  The Raptyr glasses by Vuzix won the CES Innovation Award.

The details seem to be sparse, but they are see through and seem to be exactly what I am looking for, or at least an early model.  Hopefully more details including price become available later this year.  I would be partial to an Android based interface since I already have an Android phone and experience developing on that platform.  The important part of the augmented reality component would be overlaying information on real world objects.  While truly accurately versions of a HUD overlay is still years away, I'm excited to see the progress that some companies are making.

Raptyr is the world’s first sunglass style  Video Eyewear that is designed specifically for the wide variety of Augmented Reality  applications  that are in development  for consumer, commercial, medical, educational, gaming and defense markets. It provides a natural and easy to use interface to applications and  it  is a very powerful  platform that offers a personalized and mobile home-theatre experience that enables digital content to be mixed into a real worldview. Today Raptyr is compatible only with  devices with VGA and USB  interfaces. Future enhancements to the product will include HDMI compatibility and connectivity for mobile devices such as the iPhone and Android phones.  Initial markets for Raptyr will be commercial and research applications.  As enhancements are made to Raptyr and as sales volumes increase, the company expects  consumer applications to become available.

The real inspiration for a HUD comes from the books Daemon and Freedom.  Hopefully we are only a few years away from a fully wearable computer system.

One Last Semester

It seems strange to say it, but my college career is almost over. One last semester before I get my masters degree and it is going to be a crazy one. I have a long list of things that need to be accomplished before May 2011 and graduation gets here. I'm only taking two classes, so my course load shouldn't be that bad, but that isn't what is going to keep me busy. This semester I will be finishing my thesis which will be keeping me very, very busy. The goal is to improve my DPX Answers application to perform some type of automated clustering to assist with the grading process. I am also going to be teaching Java this semester which I am hoping will be lots of fun. This is something that I definitely wanted to do it shouldn't add too much stress to my workload. One of the biggest sources of stress this semester will likely be the planning and execution of E-Expo 2011. My plan is to stay on top of everything and get things done early, but things don't always go according to plan. Hopefully SGA don't take up too much of my time, luckily I enjoy serving on the Senate a little more than I should.

My last winter break was fun while it lasted. Back to work! (Actually, back to school. Work doesn't start until after I finish with school.)

Supporting Wikipedia

As a student, Wikipedia is an amazing resource for knowledge, especially in the field of Computer Engineering.  The Wikimedia Foundation is entirely run off of donations and needs the support from users to keep the servers running.  To show my support I donated $20 to help make sure Wikipedia remains a freely available resource for the entire world.

EC2 Micro Hosting Faster than Shared Host

I switched my hosting from a shared hosting provider to an Amazon EC2 Micro instance a while back. The biggest concern I had was making sure the limited resources of the micro instance were enough to run my site. As it turns out, it is more than enough. The thing the micro instance can't do is handle load that goes on for any extended time. My website doesn't receive too many hits so this is the perfect usage.

The above graph isn't from my website, but it is from a PHP web application running on EC2. The graph is from Google Webmaster Tools for a site Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds) from the Google Crawler. You can definitely the switch in October from the shared host to the EC2 instance in the page response times.   During this time period the average number of people accessing the server and the crawl time stayed about the same.

The bottom line, I highly recommend an EC2 Micro instance for any small website.  While it does cost a little more than a shared host, the benefits definitely make it my top choice.  The downside to a micro instance is once you have sustained high CPU usage for a certain amount of time your are severely throttled.  As long as the usage is not sustained, your site will be very responsive.

Introducing ShouldISkipClass.com

If you know me, then this will seem very ironic.  Recently, after receiving the idea from a friend, I created the website ShouldISkipClass.com which provides random reasons why you should or shouldn't skip class.  The irony is that I personally never skip class.  It is really meant to be a joke site providing comical reasons for skipping or not skipping class.  The site didn't take me very long to create and as people provide me with more reasons I will be adding them to the rotation.

The first version of the site was a PHP based website that I had up and running in less than 20 minutes.  The second version is a little more robust and runs on Google App Engine so I don't have to worry about the traffic messing up my personal web server.  Still, this version of the site was finished in less than a few hours.  The main problem with a site like this is that people just stay on one page and click refresh so they can see all of the random reasons.  This is why I chose to go with App Engine.

It didn't take very long to create the site and since it is App Engine based there will be no real work or ongoing cost to maintain it.  Hopefully college students out there find some entertainment out of the site and share it with their friends.