What mistakes did Google Glass make? In an interview with WSJ, Schmidt admitted that the main reason was that the promotion was too early and too hard. In short, it is too high profile - when the product is not ready for the public, it is placed in the spotlight. Therefore, Google stopped the sale of Google Glass, the website was offline, and Apple's "father of iPods" Tony Fadell was responsible for the products.
According to the traditional classification, Google Glass belongs to Head mounted display (HMD). Although it has temporarily retired from the Jianghu, more consumer grade HMD devices have emerged with more mature virtual reality, augmented reality and holographic technology. Sony SmartEyeglass is a typical one. It integrates a transparent display screen on the glasses lens to help users superimpose a layer of digital information in their vision. This is called augmented reality AR.
Sony announced its product development plan in September 2014 [1] . At the end of March 2015, SmartEyeglass Developer Edition is available in 10 countries, including the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, Belgium, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and Sweden, with a price of $840. The official SDK is also announced [2] To facilitate developers to create software for it. Like the Android Wear watch, the SmartEyeglass application is also installed on the Android phone, and the smart glasses are equivalent to the mobile phone's extended screen.
What is SmartEyeglass
SmartEyeglass consists of glasses and controller, which are connected by cables. The sensors in the glasses part include accelerometer, gyroscope, electronic compass, ambient light sensor and 3 megapixel camera. The controller part integrates speaker, microphone NFC、 Touch pad and battery. The controller has its own clip, which can be clipped on clothes at ordinary times.
The camera of Google Glass is located above the left mirror frame and supports VGA (640x480) resolution video.
It is worth mentioning that, compared with Google Glass's fragile battery life, Sony said that the battery life of SmartEyeglass is about 150 minutes when the camera is not used, and the recording time is halved to about 80 minutes.
SmartEyeglass uses Bluetooth or Wi Fi to connect with mobile phones, and holds the controller for touch operation and voice interaction. Sony, which has always attached importance to NFC technology, has also added NFC chips to its controllers. Most Sony phones can quickly establish connections by tapping the back of the controllers.
Supporting application "SmartEyeglass" has been logged in Sony provided several use examples, including location-based navigation and city guides, and camera based face recognition.
Navigation: the most common AR use scenario, but it is more intuitive than the additional display screen of Google Glass, and the information is directly superimposed in the field of vision.
City guide: judge the position of the wearer through the gyroscope and electronic compass inside the glasses, so as to introduce the current position and scenic spot information for the wearer.
Face recognition: when the face captured by the camera is successfully paired with the avatar in the address book, the name and other information will be displayed.
In addition, this app can also be used as a simulator. Developers can debug software through related SDKs even if they don't get physical objects. As shown in the figure below, the upper part of the screen simulates the visual field seen by glasses, and the lower part is the controller operation module.
Explain the display technology of SmartEyeglass
Google Glass uses a Type screen, you need to raise your eyes to see the screen content at the top right, and others seem that the wearer's behavior is very strange. The SmartEyeglass screen is fully transparent, within the field of vision, and much more normal.
It can be understood that the "screen" of SmartEyeglass is transparent and embedded in the lens. Sony officially said that the transparency of the lens is 85% when it is turned on. What does this mean? As a reference, the transparency of ordinary contact lenses ranges from 92% to 98%. So the question is, can myopia use these glasses? We haven't found the exact answer. It is expected that the regular version can't support it, and myopic lenses need to be customized.
Official promotional video:
When it is turned off, its "screen" is invisible to the naked eye; When the machine is turned on, the small green screen on the lens can only be seen by others at a specific angle. As shown in the figure below, it is intercepted from the above promotional videos between 1'08 '' and 1'09 ''.
Many people do not know that the SmartEyeglass "screen" is monochrome, which can only display eight different shades of green, with a resolution of 419 × 138. As shown in the following figure, the photos taken by it can only be previewed in monochrome. However, this monochrome "screen" has a brightness of 1000 cd/m ², which is much higher than the flagship mobile phone. The high brightness means that users can easily read text messages in various environments.
The supporting SmartEyeglass application settings provide the screen distance setting option, that is, the human eye feels that the screen is several meters away, which can be 3m, 5m, 10m or more. Users who have not worn HMD devices such as Google Glass are hard to understand its meaning. Essentially, virtual information is combined with the scene seen in the field of vision at a distance of several meters - overlapping, so that the human eye feels not obtrusive.
Sony's unique "holographic waveguide technology" has contributed greatly to achieving the augmented reality effect of transparent screens. According to the official introduction, the so-called "screen" above is actually an image produced by an optical engine. After multiple reflections on the front and back of a 1mm thick glass panel, the image is finally formed in the human eye. The total thickness of the lens is 3mm, because the 1mm glass panel - the front and rear of the "screen" have 1mm protective layers respectively. Those who care about holographic technology can carefully study the following technical schematic diagram [3] Understand the display principle.
Similar technologies are also used in the Q-Warrior HMD for US military operations.
SmartEyeglass to display 3D images. Students who are familiar with the principle of 3D display can easily understand that different pictures can be displayed in the left and right eyes of the head mounted display, and creating a three-dimensional sense is the inherent advantage of this kind of product.
Summary
Sony's HMD (Head mounted Display) adopts the advanced binocular perspective design, which is not difficult for users to get started. However, the appearance design of the current development version completely fails to meet the requirements of going out of the street. The function and appearance are very different from Google Glass.
However, SmartEyeglass is likely to be the first to be used in some vertical fields, because it is much more realistic than Google Glass. It can do little, but it can do well. If Sony wants to build it as a consumer grade device, it may be a long way off.
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On September 19, 2014, the official website of Sony China was released 《 Sony develops "smart glasses" with transparent lenses - at the same time, it publicly releases its software development kit →
SmartEyeglass developer on Sony official website 。 →
From English official website 《Sony Releases the Transparent Lens Eyewear "SmartEyeglass Developer Edition"》 →
