Sony Unveils Smart Eyeglass

Sony unveiled its SmartEyeglass prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2014 on January 7 (local time). It did not launch the wearable device during the press conference or president Hirai Kazuo’s keynote speech on the previous day, but unveiled the product directly in its exhibition booth to catch the attendees by surprise.

According to Sony, SmartEyeglass is used mainly to display information about sports events, such as player information at a soccer match. Specifically, it shows who the player currently having the ball is, how much time is left until the match is over, etc.

Sony is an official sponsor of the Brazil World Cup and is expected to put the product to commercial use in time with the opening of the international tournament in June. The SmartEyeglass is predicted to be utilized in many more fields as well.

Google has their Google Glass, where the world is more or less familiar with this piece of technology by now, and it should not look all that quaint whenever you see someone wearing it out in the public. Having said that, other companies too, do see the potential of smart glasses and the markets that it can open up. Sony is one of them, which is why they have started to work on the SmartEyeglass transparent lens eyewear.

In fact, the software development kit (SDK) is being made available even as you read this, and the SmartEyeglass transparent lens eyewear intends to hook up to compatible smartphones in order for it to superimpose different kinds of essential information such as text, symbols, and images, onto the user’s field of view. When it comes to the smartphone compatibility list, only Android-powered devices will work at the moment – so too bad if you are rocking to iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry OS. Apart from that, not all Android-powered devices will play nice with the SmartEyeglass, since it will need to run on Android 4.1 or later. Anything less than Android 4.3 or later would mean there is no way one is able to access the video functionality of the camera.

The SmartEyeglass will feature a wide range of sensing technologies, where among them include a CMOS image sensor, accelerometer, Gyroscope, electronic compass, brightness sensor, and microphone. SmartEyeglass will make use of all these features, accompanying them with GPS location information from the connected smartphone, so that information that has been optimized will be provided to the user’s existing circumstances. Sony will take advantage of their special hologram optics technology in order to develop a lens that achieves high transparency of 85% and thickness of just 3.0 mm, all without having to use them pesky half mirrors which obstruct the user’s vision. In addition, implementing a monochrome display would make sure energy consumption is lower compared to that of a color display, while it offers high luminance (up to 1,000 cd/m2).

No idea on how much this will cost when it finally hits the market though, so stay tuned!