Tony Stark's HUD..how'd you do that?

Photo by:  Norm Chan

Photo by: Jarvis

My second costume for Dragon*Con was a Tony Stark Heads Up Display/Interior of Iron Man's suit.  So many of the shots from the Iron Man/Avengers movies showed Tony's face with graphical information and targeting displays that look really cool.  I aimed to come up with a way to bring that effect to life.

Here's how:

I started with some very nifty source material.  The artist who designed the HUD and a lot of the graphics for the movies had some materials that I used to design my own HUD.

http://jayse.tv/v2/

I took elements that I thought would look cool and work well in my design and created a Vector image in Inkscape.  I created two layers that would nicely compliment each other when I combined them as red and blue.  These images were taken to a local maker space that had a laser cutter.  The edges of the acrylic were cut and the pattern were etched.

These two panels where then heat bent with a heat gun and a large cylinder (of oatmeal, if you're curious).

Sooooooooooooooo...how'd they light up?  Well, if you've read my original Tony/Pepper build, you'd see the tablet we made by shining light through acrylic.  Any scratches glow due to internal reflection.  (SCIENCE!)  I simply controlled where the light would diffract with my etches.  I put some surface mount LEDs along the edge to create the effect.  I added three reds and three blues, but it was probably overkill.

Here's Bill trying out the sweet view.

The two layers were epoxied together using a spacer and I put a foam edge over the wiring.

The whole thing got a stiff wire to hold it place on my shoulders.  I had to Velcro it to my belt loop to keep it from tipping forward.

That's pretty much it.  It is actually a pretty simple build that could be done with a knife and time, if you don't have access to a laser cutter.  As usual, I did my best Stark Stache and used my brother's arc reactor shirt to complete the Tony transformation.