AR Eyewear From Ray-Ban
AR eyewear is one of the most exciting and potentially disruptive technologies to hit the market in years. It’s a combination of augmented reality technology and wearable displays that will revolutionize our daily lives.
But bringing all that tech inside the frame of regular glasses has been tough. Some have tried to do it by moving the electronics, lenses, and projectors to modules on each side of the glasses close to a wearer’s temples.
How AR Eyeglasses Work
AR glasses work by overlaying digital information on top of the user’s real-world surroundings. This includes computer-generated graphics, 3D models and animations.
They also allow users to access virtual data such as weather, news, sports scores and restaurant reviews. The technology can be used in many industries, from the manufacturing sector to insurance.
In manufacturing, for example, AR glasses help workers make on-site repairs and perform maintenance on equipment faster than traditional methods. They also help to increase productivity and reduce labor costs.
Additionally, AR glasses can be used by employees in healthcare, retail, and education to help students learn important skills such as coding and digital media design. They are especially helpful for people with learning disabilities, enabling them to experience the world in a new way.
Another benefit of AR coating is that it helps prevent glare from the wearer’s eyeglass lenses, which can affect visual ar eyewear acuity and cause eye strain. The coating can also be applied to sunglasses for added protection against the sun’s rays, which can also cause damage to the eyes.
The coating can be applied to all types of lenses, including progressive and bifocal lenses. These lenses automatically change between near and distance vision correction, which can be very useful for people with presbyopia or those who need reading lenses for their daily activities.
Some AR coatings are also designed to combat digital eye strain by reducing the amount of blue light that comes into your eyes from digital screens and lighting sources, which can lead to eye fatigue and other symptoms. Specialty AR coatings like TechShield(tm) Blue also reduce the blue light that’s emitted by LED lights and fluorescent tubes.
AR-coated eyeglasses also improve the overall look of your frames, making them more transparent and streamlined. This can be particularly helpful for people who are in public settings a lot, such as athletes or celebrities.
Moreover, AR coatings can also protect your lenses from scratches and smudges, which can lead to lens damage. This makes them a great option for people who are on the go and need durable, long-lasting eyewear.
The Tooz AR Glasses
Rather than trying to shoehorn a display into a flat glass lens, the Tooz AR Glasses are designed to look like normal glasses with a small micro OLED screen. Images are dispensed into the right lens, not the user’s retina, and can be displayed in a range of resolutions from 1280 x 960 to 40 x 30 degrees.
The glasses are also lightweight, comfortable and foldable, which should make them a popular choice for the 50% of the population who wear prescription eyeglasses. They’ve been tested for all-day use and have been shown to have up to a day of battery life.
These smart glasses can be paired with smartphones via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and are able to discreetly display information in the wearer’s field of view. They can show information such as navigation instructions, health data and notifications.
While they’re primarily aimed at technophiles, they’re also getting real-life commercial applications in engineering and medicine. Tooz has a pilot study underway at the University Hospital Dresden (see the bottom of this Insight for a link) that could help patients with their treatment and rehabilitation, while a company called Vuzix have targeted early adopters in the engineering services sector with their glasses.
In addition to providing a stylish look, the tooz glasses offer comfort and protection from UV rays and are able to be adjusted for individual diopters. They also feature an on/off hinge that can save battery life when the glasses aren’t in use, and have tooz SWAP technology that allows users to swap lenses independently at home or at the optician.
Tooz has teamed up with Jade Bird Display, a manufacturer of color microLED displays, to develop an optical engine that lets smart glasses have bright and full-color virtual screens without compromising the slim and lightweight form factor. It can do this by combining tooz’s curved waveguide that integrates visual correction of prescription with JBD’s color microLED display engine.
The Tooz smart glasses are designed to be a reference model that can be built into a wide variety of devices with various technical requirements. They can support touch controls, gesture controls, button controls, cameras, no cameras, augmented reality, 5G, no cellular connectivity, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and more, depending on the type of application the partner wants to build.
The One-Week AR Glasses
AR eyewear superimposes computer-generated elements, images, videos, 3D holograms or other content over real-world scenes to enhance the experience of users. This allows users to view virtual objects in the real world, which can be used for a variety of purposes, such as communication and information sharing.
There are many different types of AR glasses on the market, and they all have their own unique functions. Some are designed to provide users with a more immersive virtual experience, while ar eyewear others are intended for gaming and other entertainment applications.
The ‘One-Week’ AR Glasses have been designed by Philipp Pisarevskiy as a practical augment reality accessory that takes everyday lifestyles into account. They are designed to be comfortable to wear and feature a subdued streetwear style.
They weigh 78 grams and have an unobtrusive design that makes them feel more like a pair of Ray-Ban or Oakley glasses than a futuristic toy. They have a wide range of frame sizes and adjustable arms for a custom fit.
You can use these glasses with any smartphone over a USB-C cable, transforming them into an external monitor. The ‘Nebula’ app on your phone then serves up the content by using the laser pointer on the display as a touchpad. The bird-bath optics in the glasses also relay the image to your eyes, which helps you avoid having to look down at your phone screen.
I tested these glasses with a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and they worked great as a TV, showing content through the Nebula control app on my phone screen. They also supported’side cast’, where the app could move the content to the left of my vision, which is useful when watching video without obstructing the real-world view ahead of me.
However, I found that there was a small amount of pixelation in the AR experience that made it hard to see clearly. This is probably due to the lack of a full FOV on the display.
The One-Week AR Glasses are definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in learning more about how augmented reality is changing the way we interact with the world around us. They are easy to use and are not too expensive, making them a good option for anyone who is interested in trying out this new technology.
The Ray-Ban AR Glasses
Facebook has partnered with the iconic eyewear brand Ray-Ban to launch its first pair of AR smart glasses. Available in three classic Ray-Ban styles (Wayfarer, Round and Meteor), the glasses let you take photos and videos through cameras at each corner of the frame. They also have small speakers that turn them into headphones for streaming music and podcasts from a smartphone they’re paired with.
The Ray-Ban Stories are Facebook’s first step toward building a complete hardware ecosystem for the company’s AR ambitions. The devices are an important stepping stone for the company’s Reality Labs division, which is looking to build a set of AR glasses that will work with Facebook’s own mobile apps and back-end software.
While the Ray-Ban Stories are a good first attempt at smart glasses, they’re missing some key features that would make them more appealing to users. For example, the glasses don’t have augmented reality capabilities like those of Snap’s Spectacles, and they have low-resolution 5-megapixel cameras that aren’t as good as many modern smartphones.
Despite this, the Ray-Ban Stories are a fun way to capture photos and video in your favorite moments without sacrificing quality. They’re a great choice for travelers and anyone who wants to share their experiences with friends, without having to worry about the inconvenience of carrying a phone around.
They’re a little on the expensive side at $299, but that price tag is justified by the fact that you’ll be able to record photos and videos for up to six hours before you need to charge them again. And they come with a nice carrying case that can recharge them three times.
Another thing that makes the Ray-Ban Stories stand out from other AR glasses is how they communicate when you’re recording a photo or video. A tiny white light on the top right of the frame lights up to indicate that you’re taking a photo or recording a video.
That’s a much better design than some other AR glasses that make it hard to know when they’re in action. There are also a lot of other things that could be done to make the smart glasses more user-friendly, such as making them easy to use with a touchscreen on the bottom of the frame, or incorporating more visual cues about how you’re recording so people can easily distinguish it from a normal photo or video.
