From prototype at Maker Faire Miami to 99% Accuracy: Mateo Jarquin’s Spider-Sense Glasses Are Now Real
This past April, Mateo Jarquin came to Maker Faire Miami 2026 as a featured maker. He gave a Maker Talk called How to Build a Difference and ran a booth full of robotic arms and Iron Man hands. Tucked in alongside all of it was an early, half-wired prototype he wasn’t sure would ever work: a pair of glasses meant to give him Spider-Man’s spider-sense.
Our floor was the first place he ever showed it to anyone.
Three months later, it works. And this time he brought data.
It Started With a Ridiculous Question
Could I give myself Spider-Man’s Spider-Sense?
Most people ask that once, laugh, and drop it. Mateo bet his graduation on it. He took it on as his Integrative Course project at Champlain College Lennoxville and spent months designing, coding, soldering, failing, and rebuilding, teaching himself haptics engineering along the way.
The result has a name: V.I.S.I.O.N., short for Vibrational Interface for Surrounding Impact and Object Notification.
How It Actually Works
The glasses run on a simple loop. Infrared Time-of-Flight sensors built into a custom 3D-printed frame measure distance continuously. By tracking how that distance changes over time, Mateo’s Python code works out three things: whether an object is approaching, which direction it’s coming from, and how fast.
That information goes straight to vibration motors in the frame. You feel a buzz on the side the object is coming from, and the closer and faster it moves, the harder it buzzes.
The design decisions came out of a book. Mateo built to a principle from Engineering Haptic Devices (Kern et al., 2022): the user is a mechanical component of the system. That’s why the sensors and motors live inside the frame instead of pressing against the wearer’s head, a detail that decides whether anyone will actually keep the glasses on for more than a few minutes.
Then He Proved It Worked
A working gadget proves nothing on its own. If people can’t intuitively read the vibrations as spatial information, all you’ve built is a distraction. So Mateo designed an experiment to find out whether users could interpret directional haptic feedback as a sense.
- 6 participants, each tested twice
- 240 total trials with randomized approach directions
- Every trial blindfolded, under identical low-visibility conditions
- Measured: could you name the direction an object was coming from before it reached you?
Spatial awareness accuracy went from 14.64% without the glasses to 99.17% with them, an improvement of 84.52 percentage points.
V.I.S.I.O.N. study results, paired t-test p < 0.001
That p-value matters. It means the odds of these results coming from random chance rather than the glasses are less than 0.1%. Blindfolded participants wearing V.I.S.I.O.N. correctly identified where an object was coming from almost every single time.
Why This Matters Beyond the Costume
Strip away the Spider-Man framing and what’s left is genuinely useful: a wearable that gives you spatial awareness when your eyes can’t.
- Accessibility. A new class of assistive device for people who are blind or have low vision, one that reads approach and speed rather than only obstacles.
- Personal safety. Awareness of what’s coming up behind you when you’re walking alone at night.
- Sensory substitution. Evidence that information normally handled by one sense can be rerouted through another, and that people pick up the new channel fast.
As Mateo put it in his conclusions: even projects inspired by movies have the potential to save lives.
Watch: I Built Glasses That Give You Spider-Sense
Mateo documented the whole journey, failures included, in an 11-minute film that has already passed 70,000 views.
Watch His Full Maker Talk: How to Build a Difference
Mateo’s complete 2026 Maker Talk is now live on the Maker Faire Miami YouTube channel. If you missed the Maker Talks Zone in April, or you want to hear how a self-taught teenager gets from 3D-printed prototypes to published research, this is the one to watch.
Meet the Maker
A short introduction to Mateo, filmed at Maker Faire Miami 2026 by Akila Projects.
What’s Next for Mateo
He’s been named a Schulich Leader, one of Canada’s most competitive STEM scholarships, and heads to McGill University to study Mechanical Engineering. He plans to keep developing the glasses. His YouTube channel, MateoTechLab, is closing in on 40,000 subscribers, and you can read his full written report, graphs and all, on his project portfolio.
If you met Mateo at his booth in April, you saw this one before it was finished. A Maker Faire is where the half-built thing gets shown to people for the first time, and where somebody tells you to keep going.
Read our original feature: Meet Featured Maker Mateo Jarquin (MateoTechLab): Building the Future, One Project at a Time
Who’s Building the Next One?
Maker Faire Miami returns to the Miami-Dade County Fair & Expo Center on April 17–18, 2027. If you’ve got a half-finished idea sitting on your workbench, this is your sign. Bring it. Show it to somebody.
Come curious. Leave ready to build.
You must be logged in to post a comment.