CSCI342 Final Project: Designing Your Own Operating System for Wearable AR Glasses

Overview and Target Platform

The project articulates a design for an augmented reality operating system tailored to a wearable form factor—smart glasses—that project digital information into the user’s real-world view. Its primary audience comprises architects and engineers who need quick access to historical architectural data overlaid onto actual structures, enabling instant reference without breaking immersion. The system is conceived to be lightweight in both footprint and energy use, ensuring it can run on low-power wearable hardware while delivering a strong AR experience. By focusing on a single specialized task—identifying buildings and presenting relevant historical context—the OS aims to maximize speed, accuracy, and reliability within the constraints of a wearable device.

Hardware Profile and Sensory Capabilities

The envisioned hardware setup features lightweight eyewear equipped with high-resolution projection capabilities and a suite of sensors, including depth sensing. Depth information is central to the core objective: accurately projecting supplemental data onto real-world scenes. The sensor suite supports real-time perception and alignment of virtual content with physical objects, enabling precise overlays of architectural details, blueprints, and historical notes directly in the user’s field of view. This combination of projection and sensing underpins the seamless AR experience the OS is designed to deliver.

Core Goals: Efficiency, Real-Time Overlay, and Specialization

At its heart, the operating system emphasizes efficiency and a compact footprint to maximize performance on battery-constrained hardware. It is optimized for one specialized job—rapidly recognizing buildings and delivering contextual data overlays—rather than handling a broad mix of tasks. This specialization mirrors the philosophy of mobile-optimized systems: by limiting scope, the OS can deliver faster startup, lower latency, and more reliable real-time rendering of AR content, which is crucial for an immersive architectural workflow.

User Interface and Interaction Model

The user interface blends light-touch command capabilities with human-centered, biometric-oriented control. Interaction occurs primarily through gestures and voice commands, with no traditional physical screen. A minimalist Heads-Up Display floats within the user’s peripheral vision, providing essential indicators such as battery status and active tools. For precise actions, a compact command line appears when a user focuses on an object, and options can be selected via eye focus or subtle head movements. This approach maintains an unobtrusive visual field while enabling accurate, low-latency control over projected content.

Hybrid System Design: Security-First Core with Developer Access

The OS adopts a hybrid architecture that prioritizes security and stability, critical given the sensitivity of engineering data and historical material. The core is tightly controlled to minimize vulnerabilities and fragmentation, while still exposing a well-defined SDK and API so developers can extend functionality. This balance—a locked-down execution environment paired with a sanctioned extension surface—lets engineers integrate with CAD tools, project management platforms, and custom data layers or visual overlays without compromising the AR pipeline or system integrity.

Hardware Heterogeneity: Multi-Core ARM Processing

Computational resources are provided by a multi-core ARM-based processor that combines performance-oriented cores with efficiency-oriented cores. The high-performance cores tackle demanding tasks such as sensor data processing, real-time rendering of 3D overlays, and running lightweight AI models for building recognition. The larger set of efficiency cores handles background duties like updating the display, maintaining network connectivity, and running the operating system itself. This heterogeneous arrangement enables the system to deliver peak responsiveness for critical AR workloads while conserving power during idle or low-intensity periods.

Scheduling Strategy: Real-Time Emphasis and Task Prioritization

A priority-driven scheduler ensures that time-sensitive AR tasks receive the most immediate attention. Core AR activities—sensor input, rendering, and updating the projection pipeline—are assigned the highest priority, guaranteeing a tight feedback loop and smooth overlays. User interactions such as gestures and voice commands are given mid-level priority, while non-critical background processes like cloud synchronization or system maintenance run on the lowest tier. In scenarios where AR timing is crucial, the scheduler applies a real-time emphasis to ensure deadlines are met and the display remains fluid and accurate.

Concurrency, Synchronization, and Data Integrity

To manage concurrent operations safely, the OS employs synchronization primitives such as mutexes and condition variables. Mutexes prevent simultaneous updates to shared data like sensor readings or gesture states, protecting data integrity. Condition variables coordinate the sequence of actions across threads—for example, when new sensor data becomes available, it signals the rendering subsystem to update the projection immediately. This coordination minimizes wasted effort, reduces contention, and contributes to lower power consumption on the constrained hardware platform.

Storage Architecture and Data Management

Storage relies on fast, reliable flash memory typical of wearable devices, such as UFS or eMMC, chosen for their performance, energy efficiency, and durability. Although the OS is compact, the data it handles is substantial—large architectural assets, cached data, blueprints, 3D models, and user-generated site scans. Given the impracticality of RAID configurations on a single wearable unit, the system leverages automatic cloud backups whenever network connectivity is available, ensuring critical data remains recoverable even if the device is lost or damaged. A carefully managed file system structure keeps core OS files protected while offering a clean project-centric workspace for users and apps.

Security, Biometrics, and Data Protection

Security is a foundational concern, driven by the presence of sensitive design data and personal credentials. The glasses incorporate biometric login via built-in facial or retinal scanning, with biometric data and encryption keys stored in a dedicated secure hardware module separate from the main OS to mitigate software-based theft. If biometric authentication fails or the system reboots, users can authenticate through a strong password or PIN entered through voice commands or the projected interface. In addition, files are safeguarded with full-disk encryption to protect data in case of loss or theft, aligning with the high-stakes nature of architectural data and project information.

Data Persistence and AR Pipeline Reliability

The scheduling and storage design work together to keep the AR experience both fast and reliable. Real-time AR tasks—including sensor fusion, building recognition, and 3D overlay rendering—are prioritized to preserve smooth visuals, while less time-critical operations run on background cores. This strategy helps achieve consistent frame rates and responsive interactions, which are essential for maintaining alignment between virtual content and the physical environment, particularly in architectural contexts where precision matters.

Cloud Synchronization and Data Resilience

Recognizing the importance of data resilience, the system includes automatic, secure cloud synchronization whenever network connectivity exists. Cloud backups ensure that valuable project data, models, scans, and history are preserved beyond the life of a single device. This approach reduces the risk of data loss due to device damage or misplacement and provides a reliable recovery path for ongoing engineering work and architectural history references.

Developer Ecosystem: SDK, API Access, and Extensibility

A key design goal is to empower developers to extend the OS without compromising the AR pipeline. The included SDK and clear APIs enable integration with CAD tools, project management platforms, and visualization utilities. Developers can create new gesture or voice commands, introduce novel data layers, or build overlays that display material properties, stress-testing results, or other engineering insights directly atop AR projections. This openness fosters a rich ecosystem of capabilities tailored to architecture and engineering workflows.

Real-Time Experience, Performance Tradeoffs, and User Impact

Performance considerations revolve around delivering a stable, fast, and immersive AR experience within wearable constraints. The architecture prioritizes latency-sensitive tasks to prevent perceptible lag between user actions and visual feedback, while energy efficiency measures prolong battery life and extend the wearable’s usable time on a single charge. The design choices—hybrid processing, prioritized scheduling, and careful data management—work in concert to sustain high-quality overlays and responsive interactions, which are essential for accurate architectural interpretation and decision-making in the field.

Conclusion: A Specialized, Secure, and Extensible OS for Architects and Engineers

In summary, the proposed operating system for wearable AR glasses is a purpose-built system that balances speed, security, and extensibility. By focusing on rapid building recognition and contextual data overlays, it delivers a targeted, efficient AR experience that integrates with professional tools while safeguarding sensitive information. The architecture combines a lightweight, real-time AR pipeline with robust security measures, a developer-friendly SDK, and reliable cloud-backed data management—together enabling architects and engineers to access historical insights and architectural data precisely where and when it matters most.

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