Vuzix and Lenovo Launch Smart Eyewear in China

“Video eyewear and smart eyeglasses company Vuzix Corp. of Brighton said Thursday it had signed a deal with PC giant Lenovo to launch Vuzix’s M100 Smart Glasses into China,” reports the Democrat & Chronicle. “Vuzix launched the M100 — which includes a built-in computer and has similar capabilities as a smartphone — in late 2013 and has said it looks to the M100 to be a flagship product. According to Vuzix, the M100 in China will be co-branded as a Vuzix/Lenovo solution and marketed there as part of Lenovo’s New Business Development brand. as ‘Vuzix 100 Smart Glasses powered by Lenovo NBD.’ The Lenovo deal has Vuzix serving as the exclusive third-party provider of smart glasses to Lenovo for the Chinese industrial and commercial markets.” Read more.

Vuzix Shipping Its Smart Eyewear

Vuzix Corporation will display its M100 smart glasses at the AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon, January 6, 2014 at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. In early December, Vuzix began shipping M100 units. The Vuzix M100 smart eyewear contains a virtual display with integrated camera and an Android OS that wirelessly connects via Bluetooth or WiFi to your smartphone or other compatible device. The OS can to run standalone and Internet-dependent applications. Read more.

Investment in AR Expected to Exceed $2.5 Billion/Year

Developer investment in Augmented Reality (AR) applications will total US$670 million this year, according to a new market forecast from ABI Research. The annual amount is expected to exceed US$2.5 billion in 2018, as AR becomes a more everyday part of mobile experiences, especially in the domain of retail and marketing. This application segment accounts for 68% of the developer spend in 2013, with product enhancement and standalone apps contributing 22% and 10% of the total, respectively. Going forward, ABI Research believes that AR will become a significant enabler for the Internet of Everything, and namely big-data analytics.

This is an area where AR and data visualizations will have a close connection to the emergent wearable computing products. Practice director Dan Shey predicts: “In a world where a countless number of physical objects and structures will be connected by sensors, AR can serve as a visualization medium that will make the sensor data situational, bridged to the real-world surroundings. The consumer aspect is unsurprisingly making most of the headlines here, but we’d expect smart eyewear to initially make more waves in transforming the enterprise. Google Glass, like the smart-glass pioneer Vuzix, will find various use cases in verticals such as engineering, logistics, and healthcare.” Read more.

Smart Glasses Wins Innovation Award from CES

Vuzix Corporation's Vuzix Smart Glasses M100 was selected as an Innovations 2013 Design and Engineering best of innovations honoree and picked as the best new technology in the Wireless Handset Accessories product category. In addition, Vuzix Smart Glasses also received the honoree distinction in the Personal Electronics category as well. The awards were given by the organizers of the Consumers Electronics Show, which runs in January.

The device is described as the world's first enhanced hands-free display and communications system that can access data from a smartphone and the Internet. Its virtual display operates using an Android OS and connects to a compatible device via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. It also runs applications and games on its own, and its integrated camera enables a user to take a picture or to record a video. The device includes an integrated head tracker and GPS for spacial and positional awareness. Read more.