Optical’s TECH OUTLOOK | FRAME TECH

LEAVE THE Light On

What’s new, what’s next, and where do frame-related wearables fit in?

BY AMY SPIEZIO

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, the story was watches, watches, watches, stealing some of the spotlight away from eyeglass wearables. Combine that with the mothballing of Google’s Glass Explorer program and one begins to wonder if it’s lights out for eyeglass-based wearable technology.

The good news is it’s alive and well and exploring new options from a variety of manufacturers. Luxottica has inked a deal with Intel to develop wearables and other firms are moving forward as well.

“We are at an exciting stage of wearable tech, a growing class of devices that drives users to rethink our relationships with our technologies,” notes PSKF Lab’s “Future of Wearable Tech Report,” written in collaboration with iQ by Intel. “It opens the door for new forms of computing that impact the way we live, work, and socialize.”

HEALTHY MOVES

One of the major speed bumps Glass hit was its camera, so some of the latest developments in eyeglass wearables have edited out that option. Instead, today’s optical wearable innovators are turning to a redefined role for this technology—that of a health monitor and info tracker.

Dragon Alliance Project Genesis gear from VSP’s The SHOP

Rochester Optical’s Smart Frames for Espon Moverio

Eye Pal’s WeOn Glasses distributed by PFO Global

M100 Smart Frames for Vuzix by Rochester Optical

JINS MEME has health-tracking sensors

Heading out of the gate at Vision Expo East, VSP’s The SHOP think tank and research team made the initial announcement of its Project Genesis. (Visit EyecareBusiness.com for our web exclusive interview with The SHOP leaders Leslie Muller and Jay Sales.)

Project Genesis’ sensor technology is housed within the temple of Dragon Alliance frames and tracks steps, calories burned, activity time, and distance traveled. The device then syncs via Bluetooth to a custom app that the wearer can use to monitor their activity.

Eye Pal’s WeOn Glasses, distributed by PFO Global, is a smartglass that looks like regular eyewear and offers users enhanced performance options such as a built-in LED and audible alert tool that can let users know what is happening on their smartphone or tablet: a chat message, an SMS, an email, a call, a social media update, or an appointment or meeting.

Japanese frame manufacturer JINS is also beginning to tap into the potential of its JINS MEME wearable technology. While the gear maintains the shape of standard eyewear, it has three sensors that capture biodata such as sleepiness and attention. In addition, the sensors on one of the earpieces capture the slightest change in a user’s body direction.

“Your eyes capture a vast amount of data,” company representatives note. “The data has the potential to be applied to fields such as medicine and education to create new ways of finding and analyzing information.”

VSP’s and JINS’ products are still in the testing stages working with academia to develop applications, and the companies are also exploring options for industry partnerships.

KICKSTARTER TRENDSETTERS

Pushing the edge…

Not all of the latest technology in eyewear is coming from inside the industry. Some are starting from small groups and individual innovators.

Consider the following wearable technology with optical connections on the move at the crowd-funding site Kickstarter.

FOVE

Fove is an eye-tracking virtual reality headset. FOVE tracks a user’s gaze and calculates where in 3D space a user is looking. This enables the graphics engine to adjust focus and allocate rendering resources accordingly. The project will be funded July 4.

SOUNDglasses

Buhel Tech Sunglasses and Headphones is labeled the number-one most funded sunglass on Kickstarter. The SG06 Bluetooth Bone Conductions Glasses communicate with smartphones, electronic devices, tablets, mp3 players, and GPS to play music without earbuds and to make and receive phone calls via Bluetooth.

Sealz

Sunglasses that convert into goggles with the click of a button, Sealz were the brainchild of Lee Batey who suffered a sunburn to his eye and sought a pair of sunglasses that could rapidly transition to goggles and be worn underwater.

Bright Eyes

A DIY kit by Technology Will Save Us allows people to program glasses with 174 LEDs to run videos, images, or gifs. Utilizing open-source and micro SD card or microcontroller platforms and featuring a microphone that makes the eyewear programmable to respond to sound, the kit was created to encourage people to learn programming.

A SMARTER WORKPLACE

Business partnerships may be the key to keeping this technology going. In fact, the most robust outlook for eyeglass wearables may very well be at the office, jobsite, or factory.

While Google Glass ended its Explorer (consumer) program in January 2015, Glass at Work is still engaging potential users, notes Rochester Optical’s Patrick Ho. “Around the same time Google killed XE, Intel invested $24.8 million in smart device manufacturer Vuzix; and with market predictions of 1 million smartglasses shipped by fall 2015, 10 million by 2016, and up to 100 million by 2018, it’s clearly just the beginning.”

The potential is there for wearables in automotive, aerospace, oil and gas, medical spaces, and more. Tech research firm Gartner estimated that smartglasses could save field service organizations alone $1 billion per year by 2017.

“Hands-free access to data and computing provides significant productivity improvements,” Ho says. “Most of the 1 million devices predicted to ship by fall are in the enterprise space, and we’ll see mass adoption in enterprise before smartglasses enter the mainstream consumer market.”

JINS has a joint research project with the auto parts manufacturer Denso, to launch a research initiative for driver safety.

Working from the practical perspective, Rochester Optical has also created device adaptations that make the wearables currently on the market safer and Rx-able for workers, including Z87+ rated safety products for both Google Glass and Vuzix M100, an Rx-ready safety shield for Google Glass, and a Vuzix safety frame with clear, removable side shields and interchangeable right/left mount temple arms.

INTO THE FUTURE

So keep the light on for eyeglass wearables, but perhaps make sure the switch has a dimmer.

According to Piers Fawkes, founder and president of PSFK Labs, this technology will continue to develop: “While there is a lot of speculation about the use of computerized glasses, our analysis suggests that while these heads-up displays offer a range of options, they may not develop the full range of services that other wearables like smart clothing may offer.”

Even smart clothing and the much-admired smart watches will be bumped out, he predicts, and in the near future wearable tech is expected to evolve into implantable tech.