Killer Cap – ØF

Two nerds bullshitting about an augmented reality baseball cap.

Pablos: With AR, I think we got it wrong.

Everybody’s been trying to put dragons in the room or have a whale in the room or whatever. And they’re going for this super realistic, photorealistic, immersive experience. And I think the only thing that really matters is dashboards. And even if you get an Apple Vision Pro and it’s an extraordinary image quality, what you mainly find yourself using it for is dashboards.

You just put stuff around. It’s like here’s my messages, let me know if I got some, here’s a clock. Here’s a browser window, all this is 2D stuff, but it’s just giving me dashboard, dials and meters and alerts and info and stuff in my life.

Ash: You’re basically talking about the Terminator view, right?

Pablos: Yeah. You want terminator view.

Ash: You need terminated view.

Pablos: You want to be able to see. So all these goggles are overbuilt. I just want my glasses to put your name on your forehead.

Ash: Yeah.

Pablos: That’s all I really need.

Ash: Credit score.

Pablos: When I look at people and just put their name on their forehead, so I know who the hell they are. And then you would want dashboards for things like, tell me when to turn left, tell me where the nearest Starbucks is, stuff like that.

And my idea for this years ago was to create this shoe horn version of AR called the Killer Cap and the Killer Cap is literally baseball cap with 140 character display and all it would do initially is show you tweets from whatever sports ball team had their logo on the cap.

And so this is like a $99 product you could sell to Middle Americans. Nobody would think it was weird because it just looks like a normal baseball cap. And in the bill you have plenty of room. You could bury a battery in a cell data modem and then you could have a 140 character monochromatic display.

And then in version two, the Killer Cap has one button on the bill where that sticker usually is, for “Buy now”. So it’s like during the day you would see alerts or little tweets from the team. Like, “Hey, want to buy the, Seahawks edition of Coors Light?” Boom. Buy now.

And it would just show up on your doorstep. You know, want season tickets? Boom. Buy now.

Ash: Just on the hat.

Pablos: Yeah. It’s all in the hat.

Ash: You see what, you just see it underneath,

Pablos: Yeah, you just look up.

Ash: Just look wear it up, and underneath,

Pablos: Mm hmm. You can pretend to be listening to your wife and you can look up at the sports ball game score.

Ash: It’s actually pretty interesting, the funny thing is today you could just put a thin film like flex film little OLED.

Pablos: Yeah, so easy to build. It’s so easy to build this thing. You could make money selling them for 99 bucks. And people pay 99 bucks for a baseball cap now anyway. It’s crazy.

Ash: Yeah, I mean, could literally put it right in there. And by the way, you don’t have to do anything, it’s just Bluetooth the damn thing, right? It doesn’t need…

Pablos: I wanted to do it using the old SPOT watch network because that was like a networking system, a low bandwidth networking built into AM radio. It’s got nationwide coverage, no one uses it for anything before I buy it for a dollar and then use that to broadcast the tweets to the hats.

But now cell data modems are in everything, that’s cheap enough, you could just do it that way. Anyway, somebody should build the Killer Cap. And then the , other point I would make about it is like everybody’s trying to make glasses and it’s very difficult to integrate imagers into glasses and have it be low power enough and light enough and small enough and all that.

And it’s all very high tech, whereas the Killer Cap you could do with like probably if you spent a weekend in Shenzhen, you could design and build this thing.

Ash: By the way, you know what I’m only partially laughing about this, I’m starting to think to myself literally a heads up display.

Pablos: Yeah, it is.

Ash: It’s a budget HUD, it’s a hat mount display. So, if you misspell it well enough.

Pablos: Hat mounted display.

The spelling acronyms

Ash: It’s actually funny because what you could do is, you could have the display and you could honestly put a tiny camera in there and that’s it. Now that’s your recognition, and it’ll just have a little thing that says, Pablos.

Pablos: I think that’s where it’s going, it’s weird, cause when Google glass came out, it was universally panned as being privacy invading, nerdware, even though it was a shockingly well designed product and so they shitcanned it and then a few years later, Snapchat makes glasses with the most controversial, no screen at all, no display at all, but the most controversial part of Google Glass, which is just the camera.

And that was targeted at younger audience and it completely sold out like that thing ended up being a hit because they sold them in vending machines and it sold really well and no one ever complained about the privacy issue because it’s Snapchat audience, not the mainstream, San Francisco tech journalist audience.

There’s a lot to be learned from that kind of thing. And then now, of course, Meta is making their own glasses with Ray Ban. I haven’t been impressed by them yet, but it’s just a camera, no display. And so, if they get that going and get it to the point where you could have it do face recognition and, that’s basically solved. Just integrate it, put it in the hat.

Ash: Yeah, I’m with you. I’m all about how this could play out. I think the fun part here is we don’t have to go ultra high tech on the device, we just have to make sure that there’s augmented information and it goes back to context, as long as you know where you are, it knows where you are.

It goes back to the same theory. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. It’s the bandwidth between device and us is so low, we need stuff processed, organized, and just digested and give us some tiny bits to help with, right? I don’t need, ultra resolution to look at you so that like you said you could have a dinosaur on your head.

What I care about is who is this I’m speaking to again? I know I met him somewhere, I completely forgot his name. No, is it his birthday? Is there something I should know? To even make it happen, right. Is it like anything you can tell me that would help me? And now you don’t look like an idiot with the hat, or you could, like you said, the dashboard, you could just have it be like, all right, listen, I need the scores right now.

Pablos: Yeah. It’s basically an Apple watch built into a hat and I think it would be useful.

Ash: Well, well, I think what’s better is it’s not right. It’s less.

Your less is more theory. Yeah. It’s way less. I mean, and

Pablos: any patents

That’s true, Apple

Ash: any patents

Pablos: Except

Ash: there

Pablos: Except for maybe one in mind from a while ago.

I might have a patent or two on that, but if somebody wants to build it, I’m sure they can just license the patent.

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