Hasta La Gadget!

Vuzix has revealed its challenge to Google’s Glass, the Vuzix Smart Glasses M100, a wearable Android computer set to hit the market in early 2013. Resembling an oversized Bluetooth headset, the Ice Cream Sandwich-based M100 consists of a virtual display eyepiece, integrated WiFi and Bluetooth, a 720p HD camera, and head-tracking sensors, and can work in partnership with your iOS or Android smartphone for all manner of augmented reality applications.

That can include hands-free calling, photography, web browsing, and SMS messaging, as well as visual navigation using services like Google Maps. Any smartphone app which can output to an external monitor will be supported. The 3-axis head tracker is paired with a gyroscope, GPS, and a digital compass for pinning down your location, and there’s an earpiece and noise-canceling microphone for calls and speech commands.

The display itself runs at WQVGA resolution with a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, and gives the impression of looking at a 4-inch smartphone display viewed at a distance of 14-inches. It has more than 2,000 nits of brightness, essential for outdoor visibility when it will be competing with sunlight, and can be used with either the left or right eye.

As for the camera, that shoots widescreen video and images at 1280 x 720 resolution, and can save shots to up to an 8GB memory card. The whole thing runs a specially-fettled version of Android 4.0 on a 1GHz OMAP4430 processor with 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash storage, with WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth, along with physical power, select, and volume up/down keys.

Vuzix says the battery in the M100 is good for up to 8hrs of handsfree use, or two hours of hands-free use with the display active. That unfortunately halves to just an hour if you want to use the handsfree, display, and camera simultaneously. Google hasn’t discussed battery life for Project Glass in any detail yet, but balancing power consumption, functionality, and portability is going to be a challenge for all wearable device manufacturers. Mounting is via either an over-ear hoop, an over-head band, or a band behind the head.

Vuzix will be offering an SDK for app developers to hook their software directly into the Smart Glasses M100, and since the wearable is a standalone computer in its own right it will readily work with both iOS and Android phones and tablets. It’s already caught the attention of CES, winning the “Best of Innovations” awards in design and engineering for 2013.

Exact pricing and availability for the Vuzix M100 haven’t been revealed, with the company telling SlashGear only that it’s due early next year. However, a developer kit – including the Windows-based emulator, sample code, access to a private coders portal with assistance from Vuzix, and the promise of an early production M100 when available – is priced at $999, with the software elements of the bundle expected to be available in December 2012.

Vuzix Smart Glasses M100 takes on Google Glass in 2013 is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

A new wearable computer has gone on sale, with Motorola Solutions hoping that enterprise users will gladly sacrifice some style if it means they have both hands and a database-worth of information at all times. The Motorola HC1, based on Kopin’s Golden-i wearables technology, may not have the slick aesthetic of Google’s Glass, but for those in defense, utilities, telecommunications, aerospace, and aviation industries, it opens up persistent connectivity and remote support to the work day.

The HC1 system consists of a micro-display that’s suspended just in front, and below, of the wearer’s eyeline, running at SVGA 800 x 600 resolution to appear like a virtual 15-inch panel. It’s paired with a power-frugal 800MHz OMAP3 dualcore running Windows CE 6.0 professional with a custom speech recognition engine, WiFi b/g, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, and USB, along with a 9-axis head-tracking accelerometer with digital compass.

The twin bi-directional noise-canceling microphones can be used to talk with a remote support agent, with photos, video, and audio feedback through to the headset, as well as to use voice commands to navigate through the OS. There’s also a removable, positionable USB camera for showing them what the wearer is seeing (up to 2MP stills and 1080p 30fps video supported). If there’s no WiFi network around, the HC1 will work with mobile hotspots or a Bluetooth-tethered smartphone (with select Motorola phones, it can also pull over GPS data).

Motorola Solutions envisages the HC1 being particularly useful for fieldwork, where dispatching a number of regular engineers sporting the headset could be cheaper than flying out a specialist to each site. Instead, that specialist could monitor and instruct each engineer remotely. Meanwhile, a guide to creating apps and tools for the headset is here [pdf link], so that businesses can produce custom software to suit their particular industry.

It’s pretty much the same promise that Kopin has been making since the Golden-i concept of mid-2009, and which we tried out ourselves back in 2010. Motorola hasn’t confirmed pricing yet – the Golden-i has been available as a development kit direct from Kopin, priced at $2,500, since early last year.

Update: Motorola Solutions tells us that the list price for the HC1 “will be approximately $4,000-$5,000 per unit, with discounts for volume purchases which is how most of enterprise customers make purchases.”

Motorola Solutions HC1 wearable computer is your engineer’s Google Glass is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Life can get pretty hectic sometimes. There’s school if you’re a student, work if you’re already working, and work plus school if you’re getting a graduate degree while doing some hard labor. With all the stuff you have to do on a daily basis, your life can pass you by, if you’re not careful.

So why not get one of these Autographers when they come out, so you can keep track of your life and see if you’re living the kind of life you’ve always wanted to live?

The Autographer is a wearable camera that automatically captures images based on the data that its five sensors – specifically, a magnetometer, color sensor, infrared detector, accelerometer, and thermometer. It uses this data, along with a special algorithm to automatically snap images of meaningful changes throughout the day (and your life).

Like a miniature version of the life-recording camera from several years back, the Autographer was originally created for users with dementia, so they can remember what they’ve been doing easily. But fortunately, some people convinced its creater, OMG, to also make it available to consumers.

The Autographer is priced at £399 (~$649 USD) and will launch in the UK this November. Launches for Japan and the US will follow afterward.

[via PetaPixel via Dvice]

Looxcie isn’t just a luxurious sounding word (and terrible pun), it’s also a maker of life-sharing head-mounted cameras. Up until now, it would only let you capture your life in a rather pedestrian 480p, but the new Looxcie HD does away with that, letting you grab that bike ride in full glorious high-definition. Other additions include WiFi (previous iterations relied on Bluetooth) to hook up to your Android or iOS device with, a larger 1,200 mAh battery and improved low light performance. Owners of previous models might spot that with new features comes a new, larger form. The price of evolution it seems. The price for the device, on the other hand, is $279, or $329 if you opt for the “Explore” bundle, which incidentally you can pre-order now. Peep at the source for more.

Continue reading Looxcie HD brings 1080p and WiFi streaming to a helmet near you

Filed under: Cameras, Wearables

Looxcie HD brings 1080p and WiFi streaming to a helmet near you originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Augmented reality isn’t just a gimmick for Google Glass and Nokia City Lens, but could make industrial work safer and improve visibility for those with partial sight, according to new research. The team at Eyetap, led by “father of AR” Professor Steve Mann, has cooked up a so-called quantigraphic camera for a new WeldCam HDRchitecture (HDRchitecture) helmet that rather than simply mask the bright lighting produced by welding equipment, actually uses HDR photography techniques to pick out the details the wearer most needs to see.

Traditional welding helmets use a sheet of smoked glass for the eyepiece, cutting down on the dangerous glare from the welding process itself, but also reducing overall visibility. The HDRrchitecture system, instead, processes images coming from one or more cameras, rendering a Full HD, 30fps stream with the brighter elements stripped out but the core details retained, all in real-time.

Professor Mann actually developed HDR (high dynamic range) photography several decades ago, and has been making heavy use of it in his own Eyetap wearable computer. There, three simultaneously captured images at different exposures are combined – again, in real-time, and at 120fps – to produce a more detail-rich view of the world than could be seen by the human eye alone.

“By capturing over a dynamic range of more than a million to one,” the Eyetap team says, “we can see details that cannot be seen by the human eye or any currently existing commercially available cameras.” They’ve also come up with a standalone hardware device, small enough to fit into “a large shirt pocket,” which can process two HDMI camera inputs – one for each eye – and two HDMI outputs for separate eyepieces, with the processing done using GPUs and multicore CPUs.

Although the initial work is being presented as ideal for welding helmets, Mann & Co. believe the true usefulness is yet to be explored. Since the system is self-contained, and requires no user-controls or connected PC, it could be evolved into a set of HDR eyeglasses, for instance, aiding those with less than perfect eyesight. There’s more detail in the full research paper [pdf link].

[via Hack A Day]

Quantigraphic camera promises HDR eyesight from Father of AR is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.