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“Nobody wants to look like the guy who just got off the Starship Enterprise,” says Paul Travers, the president of AR eyewear maker Vuzix.
He’s polite here, so I’ll say what he won’t: it’s hard to wear today’s VR and AR headsets for more than an hour. They are heavy! Hololens from Microsoft is very neat, but at one and a half kilos it is a lot of headgear to carry around. And Magic jump is cool of course, but they look strange when you wear them.
Vuzix has the answer. Bee CES 2023, the company unveiled new Ultralite AR glasses, an ordinary-looking plastic frame with a small projector in one stem and a small battery and Bluetooth radio in the other. Combine that with Vuzix’s waveguides – a layer in the glasses that bends the light from the projector into your field of vision – and you’ve got ordinary-looking glasses that do the extraordinary.
I put on the Vuzix Ultralite and saw a line of green text in the corner of the right lens, the kind you see on old mainframe computers in the War Games movie. It was sharp, perfectly legible and clear as day. It was a real-time transcription of what another Vuzix employee said; the device is equally adept at displaying directions, with arrows to indicate where to travel, training status, text messages and so on.
To be clear, this is not 30fps full-color video. That technology also exists, from an Israeli company called Lumus. But it will take at least two years, the company told me, and because of the cost, it will likely appear in a monocular application when it arrives. (I mean a single lens of your goggles, although if you’re into monocles I suppose they can make one.)
But the Vuzix Ultralite is here today and it’s exactly what I was looking for. It doesn’t have a huge battery pack (or a cord for a battery that you put in your pocket) because it works directly with your phone, thanks to a simple Bluetooth connection. There isn’t much video going over that connection, so that cable isn’t necessary either. It’s just regular glasses that harness the power of your phone.
“This phone has great capabilities,” emphasizes Travers. Why would you try to recreate that? “For example, speech-language translation. You could speak French and I have the glasses on and it’s all in English in the lenses. Insert a microphone into the lenses and you can also fully communicate with your phone.
“We’ve been doing this for 26 years,” Travers told me. His company has been making waveguides for centuries and manufacturing them right here in the United States at a factory in Rochester, New York. “In the old days, the guys in the Special Forces would ask us, ‘Can you make Oakley-style sunglasses with computers in them?’ Because we want to and we call it the Oakley Gaze Half the US military would buy these things if you could do that… So that’s been a focus for us.
The US government recently awarded Microsoft a half-billion dollar contract for Hololens. Meanwhile this exists. Maybe the government should have waited?
See all of TechRadar’s CES 2023 coverage. We bring you all the latest tech news and launches, everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops and smart home gadgets.