“No one wants to look like the guy who just walked out of the Starship Enterprise,” Paul Travers, president of AR eyewear maker Vuzix, told me.
He’s being polite here, so I’ll say what he won’t: It’s hard to wear current VR and AR headsets for more than an hour. They are very heavy! Microsoft’s Hololens really neat, but weighing a pound and a half, there’s a lot of headgear to wear. And magic jump sure, but they look weird when you wear them.
Vuzix has the answer. In CES 2023, the company unveiled the new AR Ultralite glasses, a normal-looking plastic frame with a small projector hidden in one body and a small battery and Bluetooth radio in the other. Combine that with Vuzix’s waveguides – a layer in the glass that bends the projector’s light into your line of sight – and you’ve got glasses that look ordinary but do the extraordinary.
I wear Vuzix Ultralite and see in the right lens corner a line of green text, the kind you see on old mainframes in War Game. It’s sharp, perfectly legible, and bright as day. It was a real-time transcription of what another Vuzix employee was saying; The device is equally adept at showing directions, with arrows to indicate where you should go, workout status, text messages, etc.
Obviously, this is not a 30fps full color video. That technology also exists, from an Israeli company called Lumus. But at least two more years, the company told me, and due to cost, when it arrives, it’s likely to appear in an app with one eye. (Meaning your glasses only have one lens, though if you prefer monocular, I suppose they could make one.)
But Vuzix Ultralite is here today and it is exactly what I was looking for. It doesn’t have a large battery pack (or a cord to the battery you tuck in your pocket) because it works directly with your phone thanks to a simple Bluetooth connection. It doesn’t transmit much video over that connection, so there’s no need for that cable either. It’s just a pair of ordinary looking glasses that harness the power of your phone.
“This phone has great capabilities,” Travers points out. Why try to recreate that? “For example, speech-language translation. You can speak French and I wore glasses and it was all in English in the lens. Attach the microphone to the lens and you can fully interact with your phone.
“We’ve been doing this for 26 years,” Travers told me. His company has forever manufactured waveguides and manufactured them here in the United States at a facility in Rochester, New York. “Back in the day, the Special Forces people asked us, ‘Can you make Oakley-style sunglasses with a computer attached?’ Because we want that and we call it the Oakley Gaze. Half of the US military would buy these if you could do that… So that’s our focus.”
The US government recently awarded Microsoft a half a billion dollar contract for Hololens. Meanwhile, this exists. Perhaps the government should have organized?
Check out all of TechRadar’s CES 2023 coverage. We’ll bring you all the latest tech news and launches, everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops and smart home devices.
