ActiveLook glasses

What is it?

The ActiveLook glasses are special glasses with a small LED projector near the right side of your nose that projects a picture to the upper-left corner of your vision. The display is ~ 320x200 with 16 shades of yellow. It communicates over Bluetooth Low Energy protocol and can only display what an application tells it; the glasses themselves do not have any other sensors or possibility to work autonomously. The battery is supposed to last about 12 hours. That should be enough for most XC flights.

The BLE protocol allows only for low-bandwith transfers. The communication protocol itself is trying to conserve the bandwidth as much as possible. Updating the display with 1Hz frequency is generally possible, more frequent updates may work. XCTrack is generally able to do most screen updates in about 250ms.

The glasses have a motion sensor so that you could send some commands by waving your hand in front of your left eye. This feature is NOT used by XCTrack. Along with the motion sensor, the glasses have a light sensor to adjust the brightness of the display automatically to the light conditions. XCTrack allows using this sensor, however we are flying in strong light conditions. We recommend turning the display to maximum brightness and switching the automatic adjustment off. According to the documentation this supposedly saves a lot of battery power.

XCTrack integration

• First install the official ActiveLook application and upgrade the glasses to the latest firmware. XCTrack has some requirements on the firmware versions and with older firmware it just won’t work. When you look into the Preferences -> ActiveLook menu, you can check if the firmware version is OK or you need to upgrade.
• After you have upgraded the firmware, go to Preferences -> ActiveLook and connect the glasses. On a first connection some things (fonts) are uploaded into the glasses. Once this is done, the glasses are ready.
• The layout of the glasses can be configured in the Pro versions. Non-pro users have one layout available.
• Widgets in the layout may overlap, however only the top one is visible even if they overlap only partially. The overlapping widgets can be used for widgets that disappear; e.g. in the default layout the ‘Thermal gain’ widget disappears when you are not thermalling and the ‘Vertical speed’ widget that is bellow it becomes visible.
• The glasses can reasonably display only english texts; the events are directly in english, all other text are converted to ASCII
• The simple map displays simple navigation cues and airspaces. It can automatically switch to thermal assistent.
• The display is updated once per second.

Special settings

• The vertical speed and vario widgets can update up to 4 times per second if you set the averaging interval to less than 1 second. This may be interesting with external instruments that send the vario data with a higher frequency.

Problems

• Sometimes the text is slightly cut in the airspace proximity widget; that’s ok, we may fix that in the future
• If you experience some problems with text sizes at unexpected places (too big or too small texts), you may try to reload the glass configuration (Preferences -> ActiveLook -> Reload glass configuration) once or twice. This will re-upload the fonts into the glasses which would fix the font problem.