With the world going into lockdown and taking up various new pastimes, I set myself two challenges. The first was to build an AI, but I think that my laptop needs to be more powerful for that. The second was to build something that would make my VR headset easier to work with.

Supporting Firefox Reality (or any VR app) is naturally challenging. The “screen” is strapped to your head and it is difficult to share what you are seeing. Sure, there are ways to take a screenshot, but you have to then get the screenshot to a computer to be able to share it.

A few years ago, I wrote some scripts that allowed me to take a screenshot (or video footage) of the Amazon Fire TV, send it to my laptop and erase it from the stick...over the web. Not with a cable, not a direct connection, but over the web. Amazon Fire TV sticks are Android devices, so I wrote a couple of Bash scripts that fired off a number of Android Debug Bridge commands. It worked really well and with the Pico Neo 2 headset being an Android device, it should be possible to do the same.

The first challenge was trying to find the device's IP address, a bit of a hunt through the device settings. The next was being able to open a port to connect over WiFi. This was a lot of study and testing which was hard work (trying to use a headset connected over USB to a laptop), but I managed to make this work. Being keen to keep the process tidy, I then had to write a script that reversed that so that the user could reset the connection. On finding where images and videos are saved to the device and the file names used, I was then able to repurpose the Amazon tool code which fit in perfectly.

After so many failed tests, it was great seeing it work and this made me (very quickly) adapt it for video capture. It was great to meet a “lockdown challenge”, it grew my knowledge of ADB and is something I could adapt as needed in the future.