Google Glass: High Tech with a Florida Tech Touch

Apart from cars and robots, Florida Tech’s senior design also dives into new and developing technologies in order to further develop and contribute to a possible growing market. In previous years, Florida Tech has worked on various technologies such as developing a black box for Northrop Grumman and a portable, man-powered water purifier for the Water for the World program. For the second year in a row, Florida Tech is working on developing Google Glass.

Google Glass is a type of hands-free wearable interface that can provide live stream information and updates to a small panel of glass, hence the name, in front of the wearer’s eye. You can send text messages via voice recognition, have your appointments and reminders pop up thoughout the day, or even get navigation from Google Glass. This technology has been in development since 2013, first made available to a select group of individuals, and then opened to the public in May of 2014.

This year, Florida Tech has partnered up with NASA-JPL in order to develop an integration of the Google Glass with assembly warehouses. This senior design team, led by Shawn Chokshi, will use an augmented reality in order to integrate important assembly information such as torque specifications, dimensions, current issues and problematic parts in order to be displayed in the Google Glass. The team hopes to be able to have the Google Glass scan a QR code and pull up NASA-JPL’s information from a large database. The team will deliver this program, based off of the Android platform, along with the possible added interface of a tablet or smart phone in order to supplement the program’s abilities.

Team lead and mechanical engineering senior, Shawn Chokshi talks about what the hopes, expectations, obstacles, and personal thoughts are about the project.

 “Personally, I am excited to interact with the Google Glass in our final product. With an augmented reality implementation, interacting with the Glass to display desired data will be rewarding. The biggest and most prominent obstacle our team will overcome is learning to program with the Google Glass. Because the Glass is constantly being updated (as it is still in Beta), debugging will inevitably become an issue. As mechanical engineers, expanding our coding knowledge to meet the requirements of the design project will prove to be difficult, but attainable. By the end of the year, I hope to further my Android development skills. Because this project is coding intensive, I’m hoping that I can broaden my skills as a C programmer to that of something more user-friendly,” said Chokshi.

This, along with many other senior design projects, will show how mechanical engineers at Florida Tech can implement our education in order to improve existing systems in order to supplement and ease day-to-day life. Follow up on my future posts to learn more about more FIT senior design projects.