Wizzeye

Wizzeye is a very basic open-source remote assistance solution for Iristick Smart Safety Glasses. It allows a glass wearer to stream the video from the glasses' cameras to the browser of a remote observer. Bidirectional audio communication is also enabled.

Under the hood, Wizzeye makes use of the WebRTC technology to enable direct peer-to-peer communication between the glass-wearer's phone and the remote observer's computer.

Using Wizzeye

A public instance of Wizzeye is available at https://wizzeye.app/. The public instance can be used for evaluation and demonstration purposes. For real-world usage, one must install its own server.

Wizzeye allows a glass wearer to communicate with a remote observer. The glass wearer enters a room through the Wizzeye Android app installed on the phone that is connected to the Iristick Smart Safety Glasses. The remote observer can join the room with any compatible web browser. When both glass wearer and remote observer have joined the room, video will be streamed from the Iristick smart glasses to the web browser.

Multi-party conferencing is not supported. Only one glass wearer and one remote observer can be in the same room at any time.

On the phone, a room can be joined by entering its name in the start screen, or by opening a https://wizzeye.app/room-name link with Wizzeye. The remote observer can open the same link in a browser. Once a room is joined on the phone, the room link can be shared (e.g., by mail, text message, chat, etc.) by clicking on the share button in the top action bar.

Settings provisioning with QR code

The Wizzeye Android app provides a number of settings to configure the server to connect to and the STUN and TURN infrastructure. To ease the input, the app can import settings from a QR code. The QR code should contain a UTF-8-encoded semicolon-separated list of key=value pairs. The following table contains the recognized keys.

Key	Default value	Description
video_quality	NORMAL	Call quality (one of LOW, NORMAL, HD)
server	https://wizzeye.app	Signaling server
stun_hostname	stun.l.google.com:19302	STUN server
turn_hostname	(empty)	TURN server
turn_username	(empty)	Username for the TURN server
turn_password	(empty)	Password for the TURN server

For example, the following QR code data resets the settings to their default value:

video_quality=NORMAL;server=https://wizzeye.app;stun_hostname=stun.l.google.com:19302;turn_hostname=;turn_username=;turn_password=

App customization

A nice feature of Android is that apps can register themselves to handle specific URLs. Wizzeye makes use of this feature to catch URLs with pattern https://wizzeye.app/room-name and open them with Wizzeye instead of the web browser. However the URL patterns cannot be changed at run time on the phone. Hence, while the settings of the Wizzeye Android app allow to set another server to connect to, the URL pattern will not be updated.

For this reason, it is recommended to build a customized app tailored for your Wizzeye server installation. The most important parameters have been gathered together in one file: app/custom.properties. Most people will only need to edit this one file and build the app.

Important: whenever you make customizations to the app, you should change the application ID to prevent conflicts with the official Wizzeye app in the Play Store. For example, if your company has a domain name mycompany.com, you could use com.mycompany.wizzeye as application ID.

Installation

The following steps will guide you through installing Wizzeye on your own server. The steps assume a Linux server, but can be adapted for macOS or Windows.

1. Download the pre-compiled ZIP package from the releases page.
2. Extract the package to some folder on your server. We will assume the package has been extracted to /opt/wizzeye.
3. You may want to change the listening address and port in config.toml, but the default value should work just fine.
4. Start the server using your system's init system. If you are using systemd, a unit file is provided in server/config. Copy the file to /etc/systemd/system and then run:

   useradd -rMU -s /usr/sbin/nologin -d /opt/wizzeye wizzeye
   systemctl daemon-reload
   systemctl enable --now wizzeye-server

5. Configure a reverse proxy to forward HTTPS requests to http://127.0.0.1:9000 (or whatever you specified in the config.toml). Special handling may be required for the /ws path that serves a WebSocket connection. For nginx, an example configuration is available in server/config.
6. You should also have a STUN and TURN infrastructure to facilitate the peer-to-peer video communication. You can either install it yourself (e.g., with coturn) or use a hosted infrastructure. In both cases, you will have to setup the Wizzeye Android app to use your infrastructure.
7. Enjoy!

Alternatively, an official docker image is available to run in a managed cloud infrastructure. You can run it with

docker run -p 8080:8080 wizzeye/wizzeye

This will expose an HTTP server on port 8080. You will have to configure a reverse proxy or load balancer that terminates HTTPS requests, as browsers do not allow WebRTC over unencrypted HTTP. You might also want to set up a STUN/TURN infrastructure.

Building the server

1. Make sure Go 1.11 or later is installed.
2. Clone the Wizzeye repository.
3. Optionally set the GOOS and/or GOARCH environment variables to the operating system and CPU architecture you want to build for.
4. In the server folder, run

   CGO_ENABLED=0 go build

5. The resulting binary will be available as server or server.exe. Copy it, along with the webroot folder, to your server.

Note that the Wizzeye server provides a download link for the Android app's APK. This APK should have been copied to webroot/s/Wizzeye.apk.

Building the Android app

To build the Android app, you can either open the source repository in Android Studio, or follow the following steps:

1. Make sure the Android SDK is installed.
2. Clone the Wizzeye repository.
3. If you want to make a signed release build, create a file named gradle.properties in the repository root with the following content (modifying placeholders with information about your signing key):

   storeFile = /path/to/keystore.jks
   storePassword = PASSWORD_FOR_KEYSTORE
   keyAlias = ALIAS_OF_THE_KEY_IN_THE_KEYSTORE
   keyPassword = PASSWORD_FOR_THE_KEY
   

4. Run one of the following commands:

   ./gradlew assembleDebug    # for a debug build (without signing key above)
   ./gradlew assembleRelease  # for a signed release build

5. The APK will be available under app/build/outputs/apk/