Regarding screens in glasses: where is the hold up? I've been thinking of prototyping something for the past few weeks (only thinking, hence my question).
Enough battery for all-day power being able to fit in a device that doesn't look like complete shit (i.e. looks sufficiently like normal glasses or sunglasses) seems to be the problem.
However, as far as I can tell every major tech company still expects that problem to be solved and for them to be the Next Big Thing. I don't know why else they'd be putting so much money & PR into consumer AR efforts when it's niche at best, so long as you have to hold up a device to use it, unless they fully expect hardware development to come through in the nearish future and make AR glasses the next smartphone, in terms of becoming must-have and driving the next wave of human-computer interaction.
I think fewer people would have mocked it if it were in anyway accessible to ordinary folks. They set the wrong price point, which made it an easy target for ridicule because only 'rich' people with sufficient disposable income even had them.
It makes sense that the first version of something like that is going to be expensive, though. And compared to some of the high-end smartphones of today, it wasn't even that outrageous, was it? It was aimed at early adopters, which makes sense. If successful, prices would drop, cheap knock-offs would appear, and more people could afford it.
Yeah and now plenty adults are running around with powered-up Tamagotchi's on their wrists. Probably the same people who laughed at google glass would insist on wearing it now or in the near future.
The device was pretty slick, which it should be for 1500$ (Typical devkit prices I guess), I enjoyed recoding tutorials where I needed both hands - it reliably captured what I was looking at, and it was lightweight and didn’t get in the way, great tool.
Problem was the only stories about it were about the “glass-holes” walking into bars with a camera on their face. I thought it was an interesting “intervention” style art piece that showed people still expected obscurity, if not privacy.
I've tried the glasses from North, which has been bought by Google a few years ago. The projection of the screen on the lens looks cool, but the glasses had no traction in the market and the company tried to charge me C$1100+ for a pair of prescription smart glasses.
