Where smart glasses fit into a world with Oculus Rift and HoloLens
It's a tough time out there for smart glasses. Far from igniting a robust market for connected headgear, Google Glass did very much the opposite, cementing in the public consciousness the idea that smart glasses are weird, creepy and only worn by uberdorks.
As a result, the whole category -- including Glass -- has pivoted toward the enterprise market, where the fashion concerns are tiny to nonexistent. That's given smart glass makers like Epson and Vuzix some needed hope. While the goal remains to eventually create designs that are indistinguishable from regular glasses, it'll be hard to get there if there aren't clear use cases for smart glasses today.
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Epson, which recently upgraded its Moverio smart glasses with a sleeker, more powerful design, is looking to expand those use cases in two big ways, one very general and one very specific. Today the company is announcing it's sponsoring a startup accelerator program in the San Francisco Bay area, Super Ventures, which focuses on new ways to use and interact with wearables.
Epson is reaching beyond the enterprise to a specific market: drone enthusiasts.
Second, with its new Moverio BT-300 smart glasses, Epson is reaching beyond the enterprise to a specific market: drone enthusiasts. The company is working with DJI, the world's top consumer drone manufacturer, to create smart-glass software that lets drone pilots control and keep tabs on a drone while looking right at it.
The idea has lots of merit. Today, consumer drone operators often control their drones and the live camera feed from a smartphone app; Epson envisions something more like a heads-up display, showing key drone stats (speed, direction, altitude, etc.) in real time, with the camera feed inset.
The new Moverio, which Epson plans to have in its customers' hands by October, already does this to an extent. As an Android device, it already runs the current DJI apps, though they appear as a regular screen floating in front of the wearer. However, that occludes the line of sight -- the ideal drone app for smart glasses would let users see both the drone's footage and the drone itself.
The BT-300 has many improvements over its predecessor, the BT-200. Epson switched from a Texas Instruments chip to an Intel processor, letting the device run a more current version of Android (5.1 instead of 4.0) and is potentially upgradeable. It's also much more lightweight than the old model, and less front-heavy so it doesn't constantly feel like it's about to fall off.
That said, the Moverio is still a dork machine -- not something you'd ever wear in a social setting, unless you're at a drone convention. The touchpad controller still feels like a bit of a throwback (Glass' side-mounted touchpad and voice controls are elegant by comparison), and the cable still makes you look like a Borg drone.
Epson says it's been working on improving the UI, and it may have reason to hurry: With the recent launch of Microsoft HoloLens, the bar for augmented reality headsets has been pushed even higher. The HoloLens is a completely self-contained "holographic" Windows PC, and it's loaded with sensors so wearers can create holograms that interact with the real world -- a trick the Moverio can't do.
Then again, HoloLens costs $3,000. The BT-300 doesn't have an official price yet, but Epson says it'll be only a bit higher than the $699 BT-200. If all you want is a fancy heads-up display to control a drone, the choice is pretty clear.
At least that's what Epson hopes all recent buyers of DJI's drones are thinking. With that crowd, plus its respectable enterprise customers, it may have enough runway for its smart headsets to one day compete with future AR headsets. Even Facebook, which has been a leader in virtual reality with the Oculus Rift, is developing augmented reality glasses, which could one day be a direct competitor to the Moverio line. Many are predicting AR tech will eventually eclipse VR, and Epson is well positioned to take advantage of it… as long as it keeps dialing back the dork factor.
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Pete Pachal was Mashable’s Tech Editor and had been at the company from 2011 to 2019. He covered the technology industry, from self-driving cars to self-destructing smartphones.Pete has covered consumer technology in print and online for more than a decade. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Pete first uploaded himself into technology journalism at Sound & Vision magazine in 1999. Pete also served as Technology Editor at Syfy, creating the channel's technology site, DVICE (now Blastr), out of some rusty HTML code and a decompiled coat hanger. He then moved on to PCMag, where he served as the site's News Director.Pete has been featured on Fox News, the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC and CBC.Pete holds degrees in journalism from the University of King's College in Halifax and engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His favorite Doctor Who monsters are the Cybermen.
