We present OpenGlass, an open-source, privacy-oriented, local-first system for low-latency multimodal visual assistance, with a primary focus on blind and low-vision users. Cloud MLLM assistants offer strong visual understanding, but often require uploading first-person visual data and can suffer multi-second network delays; wearable glasses are ideal for sensing, but cannot host large models under tight compute and power budgets. OpenGlass addresses this gap with a sensing-computing split: an ESP32-based glasses-side unit captures visual context, while a nearby consumer-grade device performs local MLLM inference and local speech output, reducing cloud reliance and keeping raw egocentric visual data on user-controlled devices by default. We evaluate response quality, query-ready-to-audio latency, safety-aware abstention, and auditable logs. Under real ESP32 Wi-Fi capture, OpenGlass reaches 993 ms median user-to-audio latency with resized payloads and 1625 ms with raw 1280 x 720 payloads; 97.5% and 93.3% of trials fall below 2 s, respectively. OpenGlass is a user-initiated visual-assistance reference platform for obstacle/hazard awareness, sign/object queries, and image-quality self-checking, rather than a certified navigation aid. We release source code, hardware instructions, prompts, evaluation data, and logs.
Juan Manuel Delfa Victoria, Taran Cyriac John, Andrew W. Hersoncs.AI cs.LG
As Earth Observation data generation outpaces downlink bandwidth and human-in-the-loop processing, a widening gap has emerged between onboard collection and actionable ground intelligence. This paper presents NAVI-Orbital, a software system deployed on a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) spacecraft. On April 16, 2026, NAVI-Orbital achieved what is, to the authors' knowledge, the first in-orbit demonstration of a vision-language model performing autonomous multi-modal inference entirely onboard. NAVI-Orbital uses a local vision-language model (Gemma 3) to classify each captured scene, produce a text description of its content and the relationships between its features, and respond to operator follow-up via natural-language dialogue. The system is re-tasked through plain-English prompts in place of conventional command sequences, and is orchestrated by a graph-based state machine (LangGraph) coordinating dedicated agents for detection and dialogue. Results across ground benchmarking (88.16% accuracy on the 7,960-image curated AID benchmark), Flatsat validation, and live in-orbit captures of newly acquired, previously unseen Earth imagery (including uncorrected YAM-9 imagery, processed onboard with hardware-accelerated GPU inference and no fine-tuning for the flight instrument) demonstrate the feasibility of running foundation models on satellite-class edge computers to invert the conventional acquire-then-downlink-everything bandwidth profile through semantic compression of Earth observations in-orbit.