Vuzix, the company best known for making bulky projector glasses that beam 60-inch screen in front of your face, has begun to get serious about the future of computer eye-ware. It’s going to debut something at CES 2012 that could shape augmented reality for good.
Backed up by money from Nokia, Vuzix has designed and is set to demo the HD SMART glasses. These specs are a far cry from the massive hulking frames of yore – new technology allows lenses just 1.4mm thick to contain holographic filaments that can show a crystal clear HD image.
The images are designed to be fed in from receivers built into the frame’s temples, and will appear on top of the otherwise transparent lenses. While the initial use for this would be to watch movies, the ongoing development of such tech could lead elsewhere.
Kinect + Vuzix = Virtual reality gaming
The ‘SMART’ in the name pertains to that future usage. The glasses show images fed to them from an external device such as a smartphone.
If a nicely designed pair of frames with this tech built in were to talk to your handset, that would open up a whole world of possibilities for augmented reality computing. Or augmented reality Angry Birds, at least.
Vuzix is set to unveil this pioneering tech at CES 2012. We’ll be keeping an eye out, because if it’s as clever as Vuzix claims then this kind of mobile HD imaging will be a big leap forward for augmented reality.
