I recently participated in the Epson Moverio “Develop the Future” challenge, an online hackathon. Usually I’m not a fan of online hackathons, but I was excited at the chance to develop on some new and interesting hardware, the Epson Moverio BT-200.
I was introduced to the Moverio at CES in 2014. They had a really impressive augmented reality demo set up, where you could “repair” a broken AC unit using directions from the smart glasses overlaid on the actual AC unit. Fast-forward to a year later, and Epson has released a second edition of the hardware along with a public app marketplace.
App Challenge: Develop the Future
For this online hackathon, developers could submit to 2 categories: enterprise or consumer gaming. I decided to focus on a consumer facing application. Naturally, I wanted to pick something that show-cased the Moverio’s talents. I played around with some ideas involving games and the accelerometer, but I felt lukewarm about all of my ideas, and they also would have all taken a pretty huge time investment on my part.
This is one of the reasons I dislike online hackathons; the time line! There is a long lead-up to submit your app, so it is constantly weighing on you until you submit. How much time is enough time? Every time I think “that’s probably good enough” I have images in my mind of everyone else pulling 30 hour weeks on their app, and I panic and go back to add more. Plus you are usually working solo. I like the quick turn-around and social aspects of regular hackathons.
Moverio is really good for media consumption, so I decided to do an app which would incorporate that. I decided to build “Movie Night,” an app that would scan a DVD barcode and instantly play the trailer for that movie on the Moverio. I liked that this app wouldn’t be overly complex, but would still showcase the Moverio’s strengths. I also liked that it solved a pain-point that I personally have.
Most movies I watch are checked out from the library. Usually the DVDs available for immediate check-out are titles that I know nothing about. It would be cool to watch a movie’s trailer with 1 button click, instead of typing out the whole movie name on a smart phone, like I do now.
Developing on the M0verio: What was Easier
The Moverio is running Android version 4.04 (Ice Cream Sandwich), and is very similar to developing for an Android smart phone. I didn’t need to learn a whole new API; I could basically just write an Android app and run it on the Moverio. There wasn’t a whole lot of direction from Epson on design guidelines, but I used logic and borrowed some style points from Glass: no Action Bar, keep the layout simple per screen, and definitely test on the actual device to see how it looks!
Unlike Google Glass, a user can interact with individual items on the screen. The glasses are permanently attached to a smart-phone sized box, which has a track pad on it. Users use this track pad to navigate around the screen. This track pad wasn’t overly responsive, so it was very important to me to have bigger UI elements so they were easy to select.
Developing on the M0verio: What was Harder
As I mentioned, actually wearing the Moverio is an important part of judging your UI. But this was one of the more difficult parts of the project. For one thing, Moverio is *heavy* and all the weight seems to concentrate on the spindly nose pads. Also, when developing, my eyes were constantly going back and forth between the Moverio screen and my laptop screen. After an hour my eyes actually started to hurt from all that refocusing! I changed my strategy to run small incremental builds on my phone, and then periodically check out my build on the Moverio. This helped my eyes relax.
The visual display quality of the Moverio is stunning, and I was surprised to find that the camera wasn’t very good! For an augmented reality device, I believe that a high quality camera is an essential component. For my app, I needed to scan a bar-code so the camera was important.
One of the powerful things about developing on Android is the ease of which you can leverage other apps. I was planning on using a Youtube intent to display my content. On the phone it was a really magical transition: from the barcode to an instant full screen trailer!
But sadly, there is no YouTube app for the Moverio, since Moverio cannot access the Google Play store. And even if I could side load it onto my development device, I had no control over the hardware that the judges will use for the final hackathon demo. (This is another thing I dislike about online hackathons…. the demo is out of your hands.) So instead I had to use a browser intent, since that was guaranteed to be there on the Moverio the judges used. Definitely not as cool of an experience.
Submission & Final Thoughts
Once I got my app up and running, I started the submission process to get my app on the Moverio Marketplace, a requirement for the hackathon submission. The Moverio Marketplace is actually based in Japan. Meaning, by uploading my app to their store, I was technically exporting software to a different country.
This resulted in a lot of back and forth email between me and the team in Japan, where I learned I would need an ECCN number. The team in Japan was very helpful, and even addressed me as Kelly San (how cool!) throughout our conversation. I sifted through US Dept of Commerce PDFs and picked an ECCN number that looked reasonable. My app was resubmitted just over a week before the hackathon deadline and I got into the store hours before the hackathon deadline! Phew!
There were some really cool submissions to the hackathon, but this educational chemistry app “Daskalos Chemistroy” is by far my favorite. WOW, so cool! I was really happy to see that they were a winner!
You can check out my final submission here. I didn’t win anything for this hackathon, but it was a really great learning experience. I still really like the app concept, so I’m going to create an Android smart phone version to release on the Play Store. I will keep you posted on my progress!
Update:
I just learned from the Moverio team that I earned an honorable mention for my app. How exciting!! I’m so glad the judges enjoyed it. And as part of my honorable mention, I receive a pair of Moverio glasses to develop on! 😀 I am very excited!!