Epson is set to launch a new desktop PC namely the Endeavor Pro5500. The system will feature a 3.0GHz Intel Core i5-4430 processor, an Intel Z87 Express Chipset, a 4GB DDR3 RAM, a 500GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM drive, a 650W power supply and run on Windows 8 64-bit OS. The Endeavor Pro5500 will go on sale from the end of June for 132,300 Yen (about $1,338). [Epson]
Augmented reality is the future, or at least the proliferation of AR apps and hardware seems to indicate that’ll be the case. Meta revealed its own augmented reality device, called Meta 1, in January and is currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to ramp up manufacturing and get it to the people. If the headset looks familiar, that’s because its hardware is: it’s comprised, in no small part, of Epson and SoftKinetic gear. It utilizes the 960 x 540 binocular 3D displays from Epson’s Moverio glasses and the depth sensor sitting atop them comes from SoftKinetic. Of course the glasses you see are but a first generation and are wired to a battery pack worn around the waist — the company’s currently working on slimming things down with customized eyewear that’ll be revealed later this year, however. For now, the dev kit and the still-in-development Unity-based SDK are slated to ship in September, but we got to see some of what Meta 1 can do a bit early.
Filed under: Wearables
Epson has showed off their newest touchscreen all-in-one desktop PC, the Endeavor PT100E. Specs-wise, this space-saving system is equipped with a 21.5-inch 1920 x 1080 Full HD capacitive 10-point multi-touch display, a 2.60GHz Intel Celeron G1610 processor, an Intel H61 Express Chipset, a 2GB DDR3 RAM, a 500GB hard drive, a DVD Super Multi Drive and runs on Windows 8 64-bit OS. The Endeavor PT100E will be available from the end of June for 95,130 Yen (about $954). [Epson]
Epson has begun shipping their newest home theater projector, the PowerLite Home Cinema 500. Adopting the 3LCD display technology, the projector provides 800 x 600 SVGA resolution, 2600 ANSI lumens brightness, 3000:1 contrast ratio and up to 5,000 hours of lamp life (Eco Mode). It also comes with a built-in 2W mono speaker and has a number of connectivity ports including HDMI, S-Video, Composite, RCA Audio, RGB D-Sub and USB Type A. The PowerLite Home Cinema 500 is priced at $379. [Epson]
Epson is set to drop their latest A4 monochrome laser printer, the LP-S340DN. Powered by a 600MHz dual-core processor, this high-speed laser printer is able to print 35 pages (A4) per minute in single-sided black-and-white or 21 pages (A4) per minute in double-sided black-and-white at 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution. The LP-S340DN will go on sale from May 23rd for 69,980 Yen (about $684). [Epson]
Epson’s 3D display glasses, the Moverio BT-100 have been floating around as a development platform for a couple years, and APX Labs is the latest to hack the headset. APX Labs is a software firm best known for creating Terminator Vision augmented reality tech for the US military, and it decided to use the BT-100 as a vehicle to develop and showcase a smart glasses platform it’s built to work for both business and consumer applications. In order to get the functionality it needed, APX grafted a 5 megapixel camera, mic and a full suite of motion sensors to provide nine-axis head tracking onto a Moverio headset.
All that gear is shoved into a 3D-printed module and attached to the BT-100 to turn it into a pair of smart glasses. In addition to the cameras and sensors, APX also hacked an Epson daughter board onto the Moverio’s controller to allow an HDMI video feed from a smartphone to be shown on the displays. This result? A system that understands where you are, what you’re seeing and hearing and a UI that allows users to glean information from the world around them using voice commands and head gestures. That should sound familiar to fans of Google Glass, but by using Epson’s binocular displays, these smart glasses can convey depth in a way Mountain View’s monocle cannot. (Not to mention that Glass doesn’t even do AR apps… yet). The hardware we got to see was a crude prototype built for demo purposes only, but the software platform shows promise and Epson’s got a version two Moverio headset in the works — so perhaps you can see a bit of the future of smart glasses in the video after the break.
The Epson Moverio BT-100 is a pair of augmented reality glasses that, in the wake of the future success of Google Glass and the Occulus Rift, keeps itself unique with its own combination of abilities. This week SlashGear had a chat with Eric Mizufuka, Product Manager of New Markets at Epson and Scott Montgomerie, CEO and lead developer of Scope Technologies about the newest use of this still very developer-stage pair of futuristic glasses: augmented reality industrial product training.
As Eric Mizufuka explained this week, the Moverio BT-100 is “a wearable display – smartglasses – with a shade that’s removable.” What you’re seeing with these glasses is an image that can get as large as an 80-inch display depending on what you’re using them for, and they’re able to work with apps such as the one presenting 3D device augmented reality training that Scope AR is showing off this year.
At it’s base, this device is powered by an Android control unit – it’s able to run and launch Android apps just like a smartphone would, so to speak. This product in its current form was launched over a year ago, and according to Mizufuka, the unit was and is “seen originally as more of a developer platform so developers could take the lead on creating apps that would eventually shape the device.”
Epson’s Moverio BT-100 glasses are not yet consumer market ready – they’re not yet in a place where they’re meant for the consumer market, instead concentrating on developer efforts to create “that one killer app” to start the machine that is the succssful launch of the platform.
As for how they fit into the augmented reality or “smart” glasses universe thats coming to light here in 2013, Mizufuka suggests that there’s a four-point set of categories that each unit in this new market fall into, each pair of said glasses working with two.
Binocular / Monocular
Transparent / Non-Transparent
While the Epson Moverio BT-100 unit falls into the binocular and transparent category, Occulus Rift is a binocular, non-tranparent device. Google Glass, on the other hand, is a monocular tranparent device.
Epson’s product makes its way in the market with features that are, as Mizufuka suggests, rather unique. “[Moverio BT-100] is unique in that you can see 3D, and unique in that it’s in the center of your field of view so you can overlay 3D images over real objects.” This is what the company calls Real Augmented Reality.
“Glass is a beautiful product and it’s miniturized very well, but you still have some consumer kickback saying it’s too geeky.”
Mizufuka let SlashGear know that they’d be creating the final consumer units as a product that people will want to use, one that they intend to be able to be worn by everyone. “Glass is a beautiful product and it’s miniturized very well, but you still have some consumer kickback saying it’s too geeky.”
CEO and lead developer of Scope Technologies Scott Montgomerie let us know that as soon as they discovered Epson’s augmented reality glasses, they knew they had to collaborate. Their need for such a solution for their idea to overlay machine parts in 3D for users training in the industrial market seemed like a perfect fit. “Industrial Augmented Reality for machinery, overlaying 3D images over real machines seemed impracticle at first – until the idea of augmented reality glasses, like Moverio BT-100, came up.”
Mounting a camera on top of the optics they’d already had, they created the device you see demonstrated here:
Montgomerie continued: “Our strategy is in the near term to focus on these verticle market applications. I think the consumer is just getting comfortable now with wearable displays, as soon as we’re able to find that killer app in the market, we’ll be there.” Sound like the right path to take to you? Epson’s Mizufuka let it be known that the final consumer product would be both affordable and made for the mass market – and we’re hoping for more soon!
Moverio BT-100 augmented reality glasses creators talk taking on Google Glass is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Epson started selling its new sliding style Windows 8 notebook PC “Endeavor S series NY10S” today on their online shopping site Epson Direct Shop.
Sliding the 11.6 inch full HD touch panel screen back and forth, “Endeavor S series NY10S” transforms between being a note PC and a tablet.
It has an Intel Core i7-3537U processor as CPU, 8GB RAM, and 124GB SSD built-in.
It is 19.8 mm thin and weights 1.2 kg when it’s in a tablet form.
Price: About 120,000 yen
OS: Windows 8 64bit
CPU: Intel Core i7-3537U processor
LCD: 11.6 inch full HD (1920 x 1080)
Touch panel: 10 point multi touch (capacitive sensing method)
Built-in battery: 6 hours battery life
Epson has also showed off their latest A4 monochrome laser printer, the LP-S440DN. Powered by a 600MHz dual-core processor, this high-speed laser printer is able to print 45 pages (A4) per minute in single-sided black-and-white or 27 pages (A4) per minute in double-sided black-and-white at 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution. The LP-S440DN will hit the market from late May for 99,980 Yen (about $1,080). [Epson]
The augmented reality scene is hotting up, with the promise of full computer-mediated vision for the mainstream and another hint that Google won’t have the Glass market all to itself thanks to an incoming headset from startup Meta. The wearable project actually goes one step further than Project Glass, putting a full twin-display digital environment – controlled by two hand 3D tracking – in front of the user, rather than floating notifications and prompts in the corner of their eye as Google’s system does.
The prototype headset is a clunky beast, admittedly, consisting of an Epson Moverio BT-100 with a low-latency 3D camera mounted on top. According to Noah Zerkin – who you might remember from his run-in with Google’s Sergey Brin a week ago, and who had the chance to play with a Meta dev-kit – both components feed into custom electronics in a separate box, and which can currently track individual fingertips and overlay glowing dots over them in real-time, similar to what’s shown in Meta’s concept video.
Meta isn’t just using off-the-shelf Moverio headsets, either. The company has inked a deal with Epson [pdf link] to collaborate on augmented reality technologies, with the pair promising applications in media, retail, gaming, productivity, and more.
The initial promo video, however, takes an altogether consumer-friendly approach, positioning Meta as an ideal accessory for the web-obsessed social media user. That includes overlaying digital graphics – in this case Facebook – over elements of the real-world, and then using gestures to interact with them; for instance, a physical “thumbs-up” motion “Likes” a Facebook post, while news articles can be browsed by sweeping through, and then grabbing, preview bubbles floating in mid-air.
For fashionistas (a pretty broad term, if you take it to include anybody who might feel a bit self-conscious about wearing the Franken-headset Meta developer kit), there are more streamlined designs in the pipeline, with the company envisaging a slick pair of sunglasses with the stereo cameras discretely embedded in the bridge. Hopefully that would also include higher-resolution displays than the qHD resolution each Moverio panel currently runs at, and of course there are issues of battery life still to be addressed.
Epson’s existing headset runs for up to six hours, though that’s using a wired remote control unit with a battery pack. According to Zerkin, Meta and Epson are looking to replace the LCD screens in the existing Moverio with OLED panels from providers such as MicroOLED; that should introduce improvements in both visibility and power consumption.
Still, true mediated reality – as opposed to augmented reality – is an ambitious next-step for the wearables industry, and Meta believes there’s room for it to succeed. The company plans to launch its Meta 1 dev-kit on Kickstarter soon – no word on estimated pricing at this stage – and target imaginative developers of AR apps, just as Google will do later this month with its first Glass Foundry event.
Meta plans true augmented reality with Epson-powered wearable is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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