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Smart Glasses Developers Lower Expectations, Seek Common Ground with Eyewear Plus
If the smartphone revolution was defined by access and convenience, the smart glasses revolution promises to be one of experience and serendipity. Varjo Chief Product Officer Urho Konttori says, “With immersive devices getting super small, in a couple of years’ time, you’ll have them in your pocket. You’ll take the device, you put it on your head, and then other people can join the moment. It stops being about geeky entertainment and becomes a more humane form of communication than any other medium before.” Apple’s and Google’s iterative tweaking of smartphone notifications to allow the right balance between things that should grab our attention and those that shouldn’t feel like just a warmup to a world where virtually everything we see might have something useful (or not) to say.
Smart glasses’ final appeal to precedent addresses why people who may have perfect vision would don eyewear. Traditionally, that’s been a geeky affectation. As smart-glasses form factors become more like wearing traditional eyewear, they may feel no less unlikely than past longshot trends, such as people stuffing 6-inch rectangles in their pockets, wearing flashing squares of colorful light on their wrists, and walking around with little white antennae pointing down from their ears.
Amazon’s Echo Frames build Alexa into a wearable form that looks almost like a conventional pair of glasses. With its emphasis on power efficiency applied to tasks, such as image processing AI for tasks and object detection 5G, XR represents a tailor-made market for mobile chip makers, such as Qualcomm, whose chips power the Oculus Quest 2 and Microsoft HoloLens, among other devices. Hugo Swart, VP & GM of XR at Qualcomm, is pushing eyewear that offers extended reality features by offloading most of the processing and connectivity to the phone. One example is Lenovo’s enterprise-focused ThinkReality A3 glasses, which use Lenovo’s Motorola phones to navigate XR applications and the fourth generation of Snap’s curious Spectacles. While the product’s AR capabilities don’t break much technical ground, Snap is positioning the product toward creators and artists, who have used it for such projects as virtual galleries highlighting artists of color and creating walls of magnetic-poetry-style words that you can walk through.
If the smartphone revolution was defined by access and convenience, the smart glasses revolution promises to be one of experience and serendipity. Varjo Chief Product Officer Urho Konttori says, “With immersive devices getting super small, in a couple of years’ time, you’ll have them in your pocket. You’ll take the device, you put it on your head, and then other people can join the moment. It stops being about geeky entertainment and becomes a more humane form of communication than any other medium before.” Apple’s and Google’s iterative tweaking of smartphone notifications to allow the right balance between things that should grab our attention and those that shouldn’t feel like just a warmup to a world where virtually everything we see might have something useful (or not) to say.
Smart glasses’ final appeal to precedent addresses why people who may have perfect vision would don eyewear. Traditionally, that’s been a geeky affectation. As smart-glasses form factors become more like wearing traditional eyewear, they may feel no less unlikely than past longshot trends, such as people stuffing 6-inch rectangles in their pockets, wearing flashing squares of colorful light on their wrists, and walking around with little white antennae pointing down from their ears.
Amazon’s Echo Frames build Alexa into a wearable form that looks almost like a conventional pair of glasses. With its emphasis on power efficiency applied to tasks, such as image processing AI for tasks and object detection 5G, XR represents a tailor-made market for mobile chip makers, such as Qualcomm, whose chips power the Oculus Quest 2 and Microsoft HoloLens, among other devices. Hugo Swart, VP & GM of XR at Qualcomm, is pushing eyewear that offers extended reality features by offloading most of the processing and connectivity to the phone. One example is Lenovo’s enterprise-focused ThinkReality A3 glasses, which use Lenovo’s Motorola phones to navigate XR applications and the fourth generation of Snap’s curious Spectacles. While the product’s AR capabilities don’t break much technical ground, Snap is positioning the product toward creators and artists, who have used it for such projects as virtual galleries highlighting artists of color and creating walls of magnetic-poetry-style words that you can walk through.
Snap has stuck with its Spectacles through multiple generations and evolutions. Content provides another parallel to the smartphone revolution. In the commercial world, VR has been used for training, simulation, and design. HP built-in sensors into the Omnicept edition of its Reverb G2 VR headset to measure a body’s reactions in response to stressful situations that can be trained in VR—for example, trying to land a plane that has had a jet engine blow out. Just as games helped to popularize early smartphones, they’ve pushed forward both VR, with games such as Beat Saber, and AR, with games like Pokémon Go.
Magic Leap teased a future of massively scaled, augmented reality battles. Given that AT&T was a major investor, it’s not surprising that such a scenario was a dream use case for 5G, one that Niantic is seeking to move forward with its carrier alliance focused on XR. But since replacing the founder, the company has reduced expectations and is focusing on commercial applications.
Social gatherings have been a crossover frontier, with meeting and collaboration apps, such as Spatial and Arthur working across VR, AR, and flat screens. A social experience called Manova is also key to XRSpace, a startup led by former HTC CEO Peter Chou that’s developing a 5G-capable VR headset. Varjo announced Reality Cloud, which will allow users of its headset to capture their surroundings in highly precise detail and share it as a navigable environment. The announcement comes on the heels of a broad development initiative from nVidia dubbed Omniverse, which allows cloud collaboration among designers with disparate 3D design tools, and uses a system called Cloud XR to stream them to smartphones. In what could become a case of life imitating art, Omniverse is heavily based on Universal Scene Description, a file format and scene description language, developed by computer-animation pioneer Pixar.
The change in expectations doesn’t seem to keep the researchers from their wild forecasts of AR/VR growth. Even Counterpoint is getting into the game forecast shipments to grow from<5m in 2020 to 110m in 2025.
Social gatherings have been a crossover frontier, with meeting and collaboration apps, such as Spatial and Arthur working across VR, AR, and flat screens. A social experience called Manova is also key to XRSpace, a startup led by former HTC CEO Peter Chou that’s developing a 5G-capable VR headset. Varjo announced Reality Cloud, which will allow users of its headset to capture their surroundings in highly precise detail and share it as a navigable environment. The announcement comes on the heels of a broad development initiative from nVidia dubbed Omniverse, which allows cloud collaboration among designers with disparate 3D design tools, and uses a system called Cloud XR to stream them to smartphones. In what could become a case of life imitating art, Omniverse is heavily based on Universal Scene Description, a file format and scene description language, developed by computer-animation pioneer Pixar.
The change in expectations doesn’t seem to keep the researchers from their wild forecasts of AR/VR growth. Even Counterpoint is getting into the game forecast shipments to grow from<5m in 2020 to 110m in 2025.
