I put sheet music into smart glasses [video]

I 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?

This project is cool so we're hoping to arrange with Kevin to do a Show HN about it, so stay, er, tuned!

Nice 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.

One 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!

Fun, did that 8 years ago with the original Hololens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6cBX4t2kX0

This 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.

This 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.

Super cool PoC. Also an advertisement for the value of local processing over cloud.

Congratulations 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?

TIL about their glasses https://mentra.glass/

great video editing, OP. loved the playthru at the end with the text. you have real talent here, keep giong

All 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.

Cool 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?)

This 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.

That’s a fabulous project video!

Really 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!

What 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?

Nice, 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.

Wow can’t wait for v2!

That’s super cool.

Really 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?

Now that’s an awesome hackathon project! Exciting to see that smartglasses are finally getting to an interesting place.

cool~