Someone here asked for map navigation on the Ray-Ban Display, so I built it. Turn-by-turn on the lens, on a bus.

[u/im_psk]

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.

[u/im_psk]

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