Smart Glasses and Smart Eyewear

Introduction

This industry for smart and technologically advanced glasses has been extremely volatile to the public eye. When Google Glass was first released, it took the world by storm as innovative and first of its kind, but then was quickly rejected by societal standards as the cameras had always been ‘on’. The other set back to this industry is the ridiculously high starting price points, with the newer editions of the Microsoft Hololens costing a whopping $3000 at launch. Commonly the biggest issue with all of these technologies is processing power, battery life, and stylistic limitations. All of these devices are bulky and contain a low volume battery for what should and could be larger on an internal scale. To the stylistic eye, only a true techie would want to wear these products, as they just don’t match any stylistic points. 

Key Problems

-Too Bulky

-No Privacy

-Low Battery Live

-High Cost

-Extremely Advanced Processing

-Socially Outcasted

Solutions

-Reduce Air Spaces, and Remote the Processing

-Add extra privacy features, or enclose the cameras

-Remote more processing, expand the battery, frame design

-Lower Quality Materials, or Better Price Points per Consumer

-Data transfer would be optimal and streaming the data would maximize battery

-Change the Public View

Context

Smart glasses and smart wear have always had this weird interaction with society. Typically our first ideas reach the innovators, and then immediately to the media as a typically negative connotation. Socially smart glasses just haven’t been able to fit into the daily lives of techies and those alike. These products don’t run cheap either with the Oculus Quest running at the lowest cost of $400. While $400 isn’t a bad price point, it creates itself as a premium product, while it is still considered to be the lowest tier of quality in this space. While these products are harder to access they can be massively influential in the field of education and entertainment. Users can now create hospitals-like simulations and have nurses practice operational services in a virtual space without using a real human test subject. Entertainment has never been limited to anything but the technology that it is available for. When video games took over the space of entertainment in the early 1980s, and with movies like TRON inspiring the evolution of the computer, it became apparent that our technological growth would only advance us farther. Now we have an emulation of sports that look nearly lifelike. Over 40 years ago if you told someone they could use Joe Montana in a video game with a 3D, third-person view, that looks picture-perfect, no one would believe you. How would this apply to the world of VR and AR, well this means a ton of things? If we take the same technological curve and apply it to eyewear, we could be talking about nearly anything from glasses, contact lenses, holograms, and even implants. For now, we have a fairly short list of companies that are creating technologies and releasing them to the public. In the VR space alone the flagship names are Oculus, HTC, and Valve. The AR space is currently being dominated by Microsoft, Samsung, and Apple. While these companies are focused on either a smartphone or a headset experience that costs $3000 alone, they haven’t created anything for the smart wear space. Notable companies for entering the smartglasses space consist of Google, Amazon, Bose, and Focals by North.

Technology and the Re-Design

Smart Glasses could use a massive overhaul or a new perspective on how they could be created. Currently, the only products that can take you away to new places and experiences are the VR headsets created by the flagships. These companies allow users to have up to 6 degrees of freedom, which is very impressive considering products like Oculus Quest is now completely wireless and doesn’t require any sensors. The immersion of these products is absolutely impressive, but they could be significantly better. The main issue with these products is their limitation of how large the play space can be. While this isn’t a massive problem as the Quest alone can do a 10 meter by 10-meter playspace, it’s still restrictive if you want to do more things such as create a fully interactive landscape or one that has other surfaces and obstacles in the field of view. I understand that in order to make a massive space, there needs to be a lot of processing power behind it, and even an external database. Possible solutions to make an infinite play space would require a remote offload and upload in order to maintain a fairly sized set of smart glasses and to keep the VR headsets as a light of a weight that they currently are. In addition of offloading the content, it may also be helpful to have a GPS tracking on the external device or the glasses themselves, as the could have a pre-generated view of their current area, or even some preset like filters to either augment or enhance what the end-user is looking at.

These products have also been known to be very inconsiderate of other people’s privacy. The biggest complaint about Google Glass when it came out was how visible the camera was, and that people didn’t like how they couldn’t tell whether or not they were being recorded. Unfortunately for VR headsets and AR headsets, you need cameras in order for them to function. There are a few ways to approach this problem. The production of the glasses would need to generate a lot of landscapes and angles and allow the headset to retrieve them based on the data it’s given, but then you would lose the ability to have a 3D view. Another option is to have hidden cameras within the frames, that way people wouldn’t be as bugged out about them, and they could strictly only view an image but not record them. The last solution would be adding a red LED indicator light as it could let others know that there are cameras functioning on your person. 

Sizing and weight will be a massive concern for the devices as there is no way to determine whether or not they’ll be larger or just as big as we have them now. The goal is to minimize the weight and increase the stylizing of the frames, as some of them look very outlandish for the glasses. VR headsets are in a weird space as they need the bulky exterior for processing power and better heat ventilation. This could also be helped out by creating a frame that offloads onto a phone, or phone-like device, and be processed semi remotely.