Pretty much everyone has had the thought that it might be really cool to see the world like a chameleon does, right..? It seems like that’s what the inventors of the PolyEyes 2.0 headset believe, although it’s really challenging to think about how the heck they ever came up with that idea. Nevertheless, they have designed a funky-looking, weird piece of technology that lets you do just exactly that.
A strange-but-fun article on Popular Science’s website delves into the details:
The wide headset, which looks like a hammerhead shark’s face if it was a sports car in the late 1980s, uses two Raspberry Pi Camera Modules, which pivot in little clear domes. They give the viewer at least 180 degrees of vision, and feed that vision through a Raspberry Pi computer module into a viewing screen, which splits vision down the middle so each eye gets its own field of vision.
And here’s a video from the Interactive Architecture Lab, the inventors, that shows this wacky headset in action:
PolyEyes 2.0 – A Polymelia Project from Interactive Architecture Lab on Vimeo.
We can’t help but quote the acid-trippy description that the Lab has posted with this video on Vimeo:
The Polymelia Project considers the human body as an assemblage; a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction. We think of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that any replacement or extension becomes part of a continuing process of upgrading the human entity. The Polymelia Suit (PolyEyes, PolyLimbs, Exoskeleton, Sensing Suit) suggests a new communication language for the future of prosthesis and of humanity.
“You are alone in the room, except for two Raspberry Pi Camera Module spinning in the dim light. You use PolyEyes (aka Hammerhead Vision System) and through the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, you communicate with some other entities in another room, whom you cannot see. Relying solely on the Exo-skeletical Suit Controller, you must decide whether to share or receive stimuli. One of the entities wants to share its own visual field. The other entity wants to send you signals from its sensing body. He/she/it will reproduce through the PolyLimbs the body movement of the other entity. Your job is to explore alternative ways for communicating that distinguish your current performance from an embodied augmented reality.”
All we can say is: whoa…. can we have what you’re having?
And hey, grab some jumping stilts, a cape, and a few other accessories, and this could be your next bizarre Halloween costume that could really weird you out after a great party…
For more details, check out the intriguing article on the Popular Science website.
Source: PopSci.com – “POLYEYES 2.0 CAN TURN NORMAL HUMAN VISION INTO THAT OF CLUMSY CHAMELEONS“
Featured Image Credit: Screen capture from the IAL Vimeo video