Overview
Learning a song means looking away from the guitar: to a chord sheet, a phone, a tab on a music stand. AR Chords puts the chart in the glasses instead. Choose a song on your phone, press play, and after a four-beat count-in the chords arrive in your sightline, one line at a time, at the song’s tempo.
Phone + glasses
Choose a song on the app to begin
- Count-in
- Play waits a second, then counts four beats at the song’s tempo before the chart appears.
- Chart
- Section, key and a four-step beat on top; each chord sits above its word, the current line is marked, and the chart moves on every two bars.
- Hands-free
- An earlier build had no play button. Looking up started or paused the song and showed its status; looking down brought the chart back.
How it works
Two programs talk over HTTP. The phone app sends the song, the tempo and play or pause to a small server built on the AugmentOS SDK. The server keeps the beat and redraws the lens: a header with the section, the key and a four-step beat, then up to three lines with each chord placed above its word. Each screen goes through the AugmentOS cloud to the Mentra app, which passes it to the glasses over Bluetooth.
System
Two ways to start
The first build had no play button. Looking up toggled the song and showed a status card, and looking down brought the chart back, so nothing needed a hand. The second moved play and pause into the phone app, next to the song and tempo controls. Both count in four beats before the chart starts.
Design
The 2025 draft of the phone app worked but read like a settings page: a dropdown, a tempo slider with an Apply button, play and pause as two equal boxes, and a how-to list under it all. The redesign keeps every control and borrows a guitarist’s own hardware for them: three presets for the songs, a knob for tempo that applies on the next beat, a toggle for head-tilt control and a stomp switch for play and pause. One colour, the lens’s green, marks what is on the glasses.