Tag: ar glasses

This rival to Google Glass will become available for purchase during the first quarter of next year.

Sony has announced that its augmented reality glasses, a product which will be in direct competition with Google Glass, will become available by the end of March, next year.

Simultaneously, it revealed that its software development kit has now become available.

The hardware for these augmented reality glasses will also soon be available for developers. This announcement about the SmartEyeglass aligns well with a range of different product unveilings and releases within the wearable technology category. That said, while many companies (including Sony) have been stepping into wearables with devices such as smartwatches, not nearly as many have looked to headsets for this same purpose.

The augmented reality glasses from Sony were first revealed in their prototype form at the recent CES 2014.

These AR technology devices are meant to be just as versatile as Google Glass, while rising above those rival products in a number of ways. While the prototype for the SmartEyeglass is somewhat awkward in appearance, it is heavily equipped with a range of different sensors, such as an electronic compass, a gyroscope, an accelerometer, an ambient light censor, and a 3 megapixel camera. It is also wired to an external battery pack that is equipped with a microphone and added touch sensor.

Now, Sony has also released the software development kit for this wearable technology and has stated that by the end of March, next year, the hardware kits would also be ready for developers to purchase. Aside from the way that the battery is attached, the primary difference between the Sony product and Google Glass is that the SmartEyeglass uses a green monochrome display in order to be able to provide an information overlay over the actual view of the user.

Like Google Glass, the Sony augmented reality glasses will be able to sync with Android smartphones in order to provide the wearer with various types of alerts and other forms of information, such as navigation directions. After recent announcements that mobile devices have been hurting Sony’s profitability, it is clear that they are highly driven to make their mark in new cutting edge market sectors.

A new type of wearable technology could redefine the AR experience.

Andrew Maimone, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill PhD student, has developed augmented reality (AR) glasses that would allow users to digitally interact with the real world, except Maimone’s glasses are sleek, compact, and light and are realistically wearable and less of a “gimmick” in comparison to conventional AR devices.

The new AR glasses provide a wide field of view.

Maimone commented that while it is possible to utilize a tablet or a even a smartphone to call up a virtual place and character and superimpose it on the real world via a small mobile screen, this experience is not “very compelling” because the experience does not occur through a person’s vision. The smartphone or tablet only allows the user to look at the virtual place through a small window.

On the other hand, traditional augmented reality glasses are bulky due to several components that are required to make the technology work, such as lenses, waveguides, reflectors, beam splitters, and additional optics that relay a digital image to the eye and place it at a distance where it can be focused on by the eye. Unfortunately, all of the bulk this tech creates can limit a person’s field of view.

Maimone’s device is called a Pinlight Display and he has been working on this device in collaboration with three researchers from the University of North Carolina and two from Nvidia Research. The Pinlight Display does not rely on standard optical components. Instead, it utilizes an array of “pinlights”, which are essentially bright dots.

Maimone explains that “A transparent display panel is placed between the pinlights and the eye to modulate the light and form the perceived image.” He added that “Since the light rays that hit each display pixel come from the same direction, they appear in focus without the use of lenses.”

Early prototypes of the augmented reality Pinlight Displays have demonstrated 100 degree fields of view.

Currently, the best commercial augmented reality glasses only offer a field of view of up to 40 degrees, while Maimone’s glasses have demonstrated fields of view of 100 degrees or higher. While this is no doubt impressive, the present prototype is not without its problems. It currently has image quality and low resolution issues. Maimone says that the next step is to work on improving these elements. He firmly believes, however, that with the proper engineering and research, the technology could be made into something realistic for use in everyday life.