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I put sheet music into smart glasses [video]
https://github.com/kevinlinxc/AugmentedChords https://github.com/kevinlinxc/AugmentedChords
- bix6 1y agoWow can’t wait for v2!
- alex1115alex 1y agoOne of our users documented projecting sheet music onto his smart glasses's display (with a HUD). He did a great job documenting the limitations of 2025's tech, but it gives a great look into what's going to be feasible next year. Awesome job Kevin!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Chipen 1y agocool~
- joshuanapoli 1y agoThat’s a fabulous project video!
- patrickhogan1 1y agoThat’s super cool.
- dang 1y agoThis project is cool so we're hoping to arrange with Kevin to do a Show HN about it, so stay, er, tuned!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- swyx 1y agowow that's a special honor. is there a way to search up the "specially invited" Show HNs?
- dang 1y agoThere's a very incomplete list at https://news.ycombinator.com/invited https://news.ycombinator.com/invited - incomplete because it only includes posts that technically got an invitation link by email, but there are plenty of others. You can also look at https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool (explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) and find Show HNs in there. But that list includes many Show HNs that we didn't specifically help with beforehand. (So I guess you can have either a list of too many or a list of too few ) p.s. If anyone notices really cool work that would be even better if the creator did a Show HN, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
- swyx 1y agothank you dang!
- swyx 1y agofwiw that link is blocked for us: "Please log in as an administrator."
- dang 1y agoWhoa that should not be happening! Let me check... Edit: sorry - I gave the wrong URL. It should have said https://news.ycombinator.com/invited https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. I've fixed it in the comment above too.
- hougaard 1y agoFun, did that 8 years ago with the original Hololens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6cBX4t2kX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6cBX4t2kX0
- vunderba 1y agoNice work. From the Github: > This allows the pianist to not have to turn pages, and more importantly, allows them to see the music and their hands at the same time, which is an unavoidable problem with traditional sheet music. I could definitely see this being beneficial for beginners. When I lived in a dormitory during uni I often played familiar pieces from memory pretty late on a digital piano (with headphones) in extremely dim lighting so as not to disturb my roommate. At some point I just stopped having to look down at the keyboard. I play a lot of stride piano as well and that probably conditioned me to just have a sort of musical proprioception for the instrument. And of course, there's numerous examples of unbelievable blind pianists - Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Art Tatum, etc.
- atoav 1y agoI wanted to say, after a certain level looking at your fingers when playing an instrument becomes the equivalent of looking at your legs when riding the bicycle. When I start to think too much about what my fingers are doing I will play worse. For if I want to practise a particular part where I get the fingering wrong, sure, but when you play it for real, looking is counterproductive. Something like this could be great for beginners tho. But simular to automatic guitar tuners I am not sure if you should get into the habit of this technology being around.
- yusina 1y agoCounter point: people get too hung up on staring at the sheet. The sheet is just a tool to help you remember what you intend to play. The goal should always be to not need it anymore, and while using the sheet, it's like using a crutch. The "looking at your fingers" challenge then becomes that you start to play "by eye" instead of "by ear" (or "by feel") which I find is very hard to overcome. Especially when you are improvising. Though in a sense "by sheet" is just as bad.
- schwartzworld 1y ago> The goal should always be to not need it anymore, and while using the sheet, it's like using a crutch. Uh, why? Lots of pros use sheet music, especially for complex pieces. I’ve never heard of an orchestra conductor insisting everyone be off-book. It’s one thing to memorize pop songs or whatever, but nobody is out there shaming people for not memorizing Rachmaninov
- rtrgrd 1y agoCool project! I have a suggestion - since the processing is done on a moderately powerful laptop anyway, is it possible to bypass the foot pedal and use audio (from laptop or glasses) to predict when to switch to the next bar? I assume it will be a complicated but would trying to match the FFT series to the sheet music pitch data work (or would harmonics cause major headcahes?)
- yusina 1y agoMusic transcription has been around for decades, algorithm-wise. In principle this one should actually be easier since it doesn't need to transcribe from scratch but "only" find where in a given sheet you are most likely to currently be. (Next step: evaluate afterwords and point out mistakes)
- simonjgreen 1y agoSuper cool PoC. Also an advertisement for the value of local processing over cloud.
- OkGoDoIt 1y agoNow that’s an awesome hackathon project! Exciting to see that smartglasses are finally getting to an interesting place.
- bambax 1y agoThis is a really cool project. From the end of the video: > I had the bars of music auto-sending at a preset interval. The pedals, instead of flipping bars, temporarily pause the flipping or speed it up, in case I'm desynced from the glasses. That's how teleprompter apps work. Of course the difference is that when speaking you can pause a little if you get desynced, while with music you're like "on a train" and if you pause, it shows. But having an interval is not shocking. Maybe the problem with this is that typically, sheet music resolution is not constant -- if there are many short notes it will result in a larger space on the page (a larger bitmap) than if there are few long notes. So maybe an approach is to send a fixed number of bars, regardless of their actual size, so that the interval can have a constant relation with the tempo of the piece? > My dream smart glasses would just listen to the performance and automatically flip bars Couldn't the phone do that? The phone is already the part doing most of the work.
- swyx 1y agoTIL about their glasses https://mentra.glass/ https://mentra.glass/ great video editing, OP. loved the playthru at the end with the text. you have real talent here, keep giong
- kevinlinxc 1y agoThank you, the typewriter effect is surprisingly hard, requires a pretty complicated expression in after effects
- swyx 1y agoi feel like someone could make "new aftereffects" just making the common things that people do easier got any more of these effects you'd put in that category?
- kevinlinxc 1y agoAnother huge time sink is rotoscoping, e.g. in my video I rotoscope the legs of the piano bench and its a cool effect but it took almost an hour for those few seconds. AI has come far here, but afaik there's no great, free workflow yet. Would love to Docker compose something on my computer, open a webapp, drag my clip in and export segmented videos.
- Abishek_Muthian 1y agoCongratulations for the project and for winning the hackathon, nicely done! I am looking for hackable smart glasses with camera which doesn't rely upon any proprietary service to work, Mentra seems to have a camera version but this video seems to suggest that we need to use their service all the time?
- caydenpiercehax 1y agoMentra Live is indeed a camera + speakers + microphone pair of lightweight smart glasses - that you can build for. Mentra Live runs AugmentOS, so you can control all the I/O (camera, speakers, mic) in your own app with the AugmentOS SDK. Regarding use the backend service all the time: Most apps/developers connect through official AugmentOS.org servers and focus on building their apps, but you can self-host your own backend if you want.
- ginko 1y agoReally nice project. Would be interesting to dive a bit deeper where this 3s latency comes from. I assume the bitmaps have been pregenerated so I guess it's just the turnaround time when accessing the AugmentOS servers?
- kevinlinxc 1y agoA lot of the time is from the glasses themselves, but apparently Mentra talked to the Even CEO and next gen bitmaps will be much better
- caydenpiercehax 1y agoThe 3 seconds of latency is writing a bitmap image from the phone to the smart glasses over BLE. It's very fast to send text, but slow to send bitmaps. For text, everything is fast - the AugmentOS servers introduce <350ms round trip latency in most places/countries. In next-generation glasses, this will be a lot faster because of better bitmaps handling, BMP encoding schemes, and also pre-loading of BMPs.
- illwrks 1y agoThis is great!!! A lot of digital pianos have midi out, (there was a midi recording tool posted here months ago by another HN member) I wonder if you could use that midi signal to keep what you see in sync with your playing to drive page turns? You could even add a karaoke like highlight to show the note being played.
- schobi 1y agoThis is really awesome! I was surprised about using dilation. I would have expected music21 to support rendering to a certain resolution/dpi setting directly and avoid rescaling the images. But from the music21 documentation this is not obvious how to do it. Rendering music to a low dpi screen nicely (pixel perfect) could circumvent some of the hardware limitations in the mid term.
- gavinray 1y agoI am so unbelievably excited for consumer-grade, useful AR. There was a lot of hype around VR, but for the last 10 years I've been following progress on AR glasses. The thing about AR is that it has the ability to enhance everything in your daily life, versus VR which is meant to be a separate experience. Both Meta and Samsung are due to put out consumer AR glasses later this year and I think this might be the first wave of useful, daily-wear glasses we'll see. Is there anyone who works in the AR space that could comment more?
- gavinray 1y agoJust bought a pair of the Mentra Mach1 glasses, let's see how they pan out.
- febed 1y agoAny workaround for those needing prescription glasses?
- alex1115alex 1y agoYou can get prescription inserts from Vuzix, but they're pretty bad. If you need a prescription, and want to run AugmentOS, your best bet is to buy the Even Realities G1 instead.
- apples_oranges 1y agoUnlike you i think the potential is rather in business and work. Useful info when needed.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- caydenpiercehax 1y ago100% agree. I've been building smart glasses for over 7 years. First 6 years were in academia because the tech wasn't ready yet, because they were too heavy and battery didn't last long enough. But in the last year, all-day battery smart glasses have become lightweight enough to be worn all day (see Even Realities G1, Vuzix Z100, etc.). I believe smart glasses are having their iPhone moment in 2025 + 2026. We make the smart glasses OS that Kevin used in the video to make this smart glasses app: AugmentOS.org
- pazimzadeh 1y agoNice, I recently had a very similar idea. I bought the Vusix Z100 from Amazon japan to do this kind of thing. They also run AugmentOS (supposedly? iOS doesn't seem supported yet) so I'll try yours out.
- mk_stjames 1y agoAll these glasses have so many layers of abstraction I don't want between something I develop and the display. Let me connect via bluetooth direct to the glasses with anything and just tx/rx via a serial port and some low level protocol to get pixels/text on the screen. This is also the only way I'd be able to buy a pair and feel safe it won't be able to be bricked in 2 years when some company shuts their server down and ends support.
- sintezcs 1y agoCheck out brilliant.xyz
- alex1115alex 1y agoAugmentOS is open source, so feel free to self-host, or even reference our communicator code in our repo to interact with the glasses directly via BLE. This is an inferior means of development, however. By going through AugmentOS, you get a much easier development experience, compatibility with multiple pairs of glasses (through both iOS and Android), and the ability to run multiple glasses apps simultaneously.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- seabass 1y agoReally awesome project! I’m reminded of something else in the AR/music space from a few years back. Someone made a VR passthrough app to project synthesia-style keyboard overlays onto your actual piano keys. Always cool to see what new hardware can enable. Congrats!
- hhyndman 1y agoWhat a great idea. I am a musician and use an iPad for my scores. It would be wonderful to replace my glasses with a pair that can display the music. I noticed the iron ring on your pinkie -- Canadian engineer?
- kevinlinxc 1y agoCorrect!
- cpursley 1y agoOkay, I think I'm finally sold that AR has useful applications. As non-gammer, I've sort of mostly written it off. Cool stuff.