AR Eyewear Goes after the Sports Market

“In September, at the height of New York Fashion Week, Google co-founder Sergey Brin debuted his new heads-up-display eyewear, Glass by Google—essentially a smartphone with a monocle for a screen—at designer Diane von Fürstenberg’s runway show. The critics reacted as though he’d shown up in Tevas and socks. 'Mr. Brin was wearing a pair with a turquoise stem that made him look as if he had stabbed himself in the eye with the straw of some tropical frozen cocktail,' wrote New York Times fashion blogger Eric Wilson.” So begins the Outside post. “Unglamorous? Maybe, but the high-tech glasses are part of a larger effort to develop wearable GPS-and-4G-enabled smartphones that integrate useful data into your field of vision. Though heads-up displays, or HUDs, have been projected onto glass screens in fighter planes since World War II, making the technology small and agile enough to be portable has proved difficult. One leader in the field is Recon Instruments, of Vancouver, British Columbia, which introduced a rudimentary prototype display in a pair of ski goggles in 2007.” Read more.