It seems that after Google made a short blog post about its Project Glass it has lit a match under the market and both new startups and established players are rushing to let you know about how well their individual efforts are going in this space as well.
The latest to appear on the radar is a company called Vergence Labs, and it is taking an increasingly familiar route to funding by appealing to individuals at a crowd funding site, and this one is using Kickstarter.
The funding here is seeking to raise $50,000 and the drop dead date is June 7th, so as of this writing it has 15 days to go. It also has already raised almost half of what is seeking as it now has $22,008 pledged.
I like the pitch which in part claims “become part of the future human-computer revolution!” I thought that I did that when I bought my first PC, an Apple II with not one but two floppy drives. The computer enabled eye wear will have the ability to record HD images and video from a first person point of view at the touch of a button. In addition they are being touted as the world’s first electric sunglasses with chromatic shifting conductive glass by which it means they darken when in sunlight.
The company sees the glasses as a social media tool and is establishing a web sharing site called YouGen.TV from which users can share experiences and export to Twitter, Google + and Facebook. I can see sports fans doing this and I wonder how the leagues will take to it.
MLB has been particularly tough about posting images from its games onto YouTube and I cannot believe that it is going to relent simply because computer powered glasses have made it easier to record the event.
Vergence also has pretty ambitious plans in the future hopes to make glasses that can perform a variety of tasks including sending information directly to a users eyes, and possibly develop interfaces for robotic devices that can be controlled with a gesture.
As with many of the Kickstarter offerings I love the creativity that developers are bringing to the market. Of course it is cracking the market that is the challenge. It is much harder, in my opinion, for hardware developers to do so that software. It is a snap to download a dozen apps in a few minutes, but most people I know, myself included, are concerned with how they look in glasses, just to take the lowest possible issue.
Then there is the competition. Google was very vague about its Google’s Project Glass remarks so it is hard to judge what it plans to do, and others have come out with, or at least talked about, connected glasses and goggles including Recon Instruments and Oakley. Still it looks like there is some momentum in this space and someone is going to break through and establish ‘glasses’ as a new computing device category.
