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Bringing the price down to $50

A project log for Less than $100, high FOV, mobile AR glasses

Augmented Reality glasses using modified lowcost Android phones

kvtoetkvtoet 02/09/2019 at 11:480 Comments

Given the cost of the AR glasses can be brought down to below $20, there is still the phone hardware left. Currently the phone costs at least $70 (for the Leagoo KICAA MIX).

However there are phones on Aliexpress that cost $30.

The differences between these price ranges can be seen in:

- the resolution ($70 gets you 1920x1080 or similar, $30 is 960x480~)

- the processor (Octacore 1.5ghz or Quadcore 1.3ghz, both MediaTek).

The cheaper ones have benefits:

- the screen is 4-5 inch. Currently the AR glasses don't make use of the entire screen with the bigger, expensive phones. Keeping a larger screen on costs extra battery. With custom lenses a higher resolution phone could have the benefit in pixel/degree, but currently not very much the case.

- a smaller screen allows for smaller AR glasses.

- weight is much lower. A 3000mah battery adds a lot of weight.

- the quad core CPU is probably more efficient. I think they're both on the same nm die size.

I'm fairly certain I can make the positional tracker work fine on the quad core CPU, perhaps with a somewhat lower camera resolution if needed.

What is left is that the cheaper phones have regular front cameras. The phones that are used now have long flex ribbons leading to the camera by design; the $30 phones do not. Thus a flex ribbon extender needs to be made. In my research I found this can be a hassle, due to custom connectors being used which can be hard to source, more so out of China. If anyone has any ideas, I'd like to hear them.

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