Hasta La Gadget!

We know Glass comes with some snap-on shades, which is no doubt great when casually vlogging in the sun. If you’re heading down a mountain, though, you’re going to need something a little more like Recon Jet. You may know Recon Instruments from its line of technolicious HUD ski goggles, but Jet sees the firm leap into more casual (yet no less useful) eyewear. Inside you’ll find a dual-core processor, WiFi, GPS, Ant+, Bluetooth and an HD camera, plus all the sensors you could want (altimeter, thermometer, accelerometer etc). Recon Jet comes with its own open platform (which typically has been based on Android), and will have some existing native apps (video streaming, Facebook integration, etc.) on display at Google I/O this week. Comparison with Mountain View’s own product will be inevitable, but we’re guessing that Recon hopes you’ll leave Glass on your desk, while popping Jet on for the weekend.

Filed under: Peripherals, Wearables

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There’s a good chance that you, like us, enjoyed a certain Saturday Night Live sketch recently in which Weekend Update’s newly branded tech correspondent Randall Meeks gave his raw impressions of Google Glass — using a prop made of plastic and attached to a pair of sunglasses. There was a lot of shouting, twitching and, for us at least, laughing. Meeks is played by the incredibly talented Fred Armisen, also well-known for IFC’s surreally hilarious Portlandia. In reality, we learned, Armisen had never used Google Glass. That was a situation we were happy to fix.

Filed under: Wearables, Google

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Withings introduced its Smart Activity Tracker at CES with many details regarding how it worked, but few hints of just when it would reach our belts and wrists. Courtesy of an FCC approval, we now know that it’s relatively close. The exercise and sleep sensor has gone through US testing with no real surprises in hardware, but a much simpler branding strategy: the manual suggests the tracker will just be called the Pulse, which could help in a market full of one-word rivals. About all that’s left is for Withings to say exactly where and when we can get its new wearable.

Filed under: Peripherals, Wearables

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Source: FCC

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

The television. The PC. The cellphone. We take the things in these sentence fragments for granted today, but they took many years to enter the mainstream. Could Google Glass herald the next great product that we will one day wonder how we lived without? Based on three days of not using the product, you may want to ask someone else.

Filed under: Misc, Wearables, Google

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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.

Filed under: Displays, Wearables

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