u/im_psk

Anything you draw on a waveguide adds to the light already coming through it. Black emits nothing, so it reads as clear glass and dark text dissolves into whatever is behind it. A layout that looked right on your monitor at 2am is gone on a sunny sidewalk.

WASD is a browser tool for finding that out before you sideload anything. Paste a URL and it renders your app in a simulated panel over point of view footage shot through the glasses, with display luminance and ambient light as separate sliders.

https://wasd.tools Free, no signup, MIT.

It simulates Meta Ray-Ban Display because that is the pair I own: 600 x 450, about 20 degrees, right eye, 300 to 2000 nits against 50 to 30,000 lux, 20 real scenes.

But the device is one object in the source:

'meta-ray-ban-display': {
panel: { w: 600, h: 450 },
fovDeg: 20,
eye: 'right',
luminance: { min: 300, max: 2000, start: 1000, step: 50 },
recording: { aspect: 1, ratio: 0.70 },
}
Add an entry, load ?device=your-key, and the geometry, the angular readout, the brightness range and the capture framing all follow. No CSS to touch.

So if you are on Xreal, Even Realities, Rokid, Vuzix, Brilliant Labs or something you soldered yourself, that object is the whole contribution. Send a PR, or open an issue with the specs and I will wire it in. Footage from your own hardware is worth more than the numbers, since the scenes carry one device's eye height.

Which device should be the second profile?

I've worn Ray-Ban Display daily for three months building small apps on them. The loop was always: load the layout, walk outside, squint, come back, change a type size, do it again.

So I made the tool I wanted. Paste a URL and it renders your app over footage shot on the glasses themselves.

You cannot draw black on these glasses. The display only adds light, so black emits nothing and reads as clear glass, and dark text dissolves into whatever is behind it. A layout that looks perfect on your monitor at 2am can be gone on a sunny sidewalk.

* 20 scenes shot on the glasses, at wearer height rather than phone height
* Luminance (300 to 2000 nits) and ambient light (50 to 30,000 lux) as separate sliders, with the contrast ratio they produce
* Record the result, 16:9 or 1:1 like the glasses' own recorder
* QR handoff to open an app on real glasses
* Loads any site that allows framing, and warns you when one refuses

Free, in the browser, no signup, MIT. I help organize a hackathon next week where students will be building glasses apps, which is what finally made me put this somewhere public.

It's an approximation, not a photometric model. If you own a pair, I'd like to know whether the daylight scenes match what you actually see.

Last week I posted my gym demo here and a few of you were, fairly, unimpressed that the thing on the lens was just text. One of you asked for actual map navigation. So I built it.

The clip is me on a bus. I say "take me to [building]" and the Ray-Ban Display lens pulls up a Mapbox map and starts turn-by-turn. Phone stays in my pocket.

The part I actually care about is what happens next. Mid-navigation I asked "what is a potato", the lens showed me a picture of a potato, and then it dropped back into the map where it left off. That is the whole interaction problem compressed into one small panel: you get a single tiny monocular display, so anything that wants to show you something has to negotiate for it, and navigation has to be a state you can leave and return to rather than a thing you cancel.

So the lens is now doing:

🗺️ Mapbox map and turn-by-turn, updating as you move

🖼️ real images inside answers, not just text

↩️ a return-to-navigation stack, so an unrelated question doesn't blow away your route

Same architecture underneath as before: on-device transcription, bring your own model, answers spoken into your ears. Nothing about the mic-vs-HUD firmware fight got easier.

It was genuinely useful to me on a bus in a city I don't know well, which is sooner than I expected to be able to say that.

Repo in a comment. Happy to go into how the map gets onto the lens, the surface arbitration, or why the Display makes you fight for every pixel.

35s from the gym tonight. I asked Hermes, my AI agent, to build me a workout app so I'd know my next exercise. It shipped a webpage, then reshaped that same app for the glasses: glance-able navigation and a timer, no phone needed between sets.

The workout app isn't the point. The point is the architecture. The agent doesn't just answer questions, it builds a purpose-built, glasses-native tool for the task in front of you, in the moment you need it. A boring everyday task gets better because the app was made for the form factor on your face, not ported down from a phone.

SwiftUI on Meta's Wearables Device Access Toolkit, on-device speech-to-text, fully open source:

👉 https://github.com/prasanthsasikumar/hermes-glasses

What everyday task would you want an on-glasses agent to build you an app for?