Metaverse One

 The idea of immersing ourselves deeper into an augmented and or virtual reality has captivated many of us thanks to sci-fi books like Snow Crash and Rainbows End . It has also created an explosion in growth the past few years of Head Mounted Displays (HMD) and augmented reality glasses projects. AR glasses and HMDs have been around for some time but people really started to get excited about augmented reality headwear when Google announced Glass back in 2012. So let's start the review here. Google Glass : Before the recent announcement of it being discontinued  but now "graduating" from the Google X experimental projects incubator to become its own independent division (that will report to Nest's Tony Fadell), Google Glass was a $1,500 type of wearable technology with an optical head-mounted display (OHMD). It was developed by Google with the mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer. Tailored mainly to work with Google products, Google Glass disp...

Here is a cool concept video from Meta , makers of SpaceGlasses. Meta comes out of research at Columbia University. The super klunky glasses you see in the video are the combination of Epson's Moverio glasses  and a 3D depth camera mounted on the top. While the glasses are real, the applications are just concepts. I saw there booth and setup at the AWE event a few months back and they had no application this polished. Meta does have a growing number of developers and a lot of potential given the overlaid display and interface to be really cool augmented reality glasses. I look forward to getting a pair of the streamlined version shipping next year.

On June 4-5 in Santa Cara was the Augmented World Event, formerly known as the Augmented Reality Event. As before, the event featured engaging keynotes, great speakers, and plenty of tech to augment anyone's world. This year the fourth annual event opened up to feature other technologies complimentary to augmented reality. In the past the event has been a majority about vision based AR so this was a nice and much needed change. There were several vendors showing off various forms of wearable displays, 3D printers, and more. The event also had a mini-museum of wearable computing glasses that have been made over the years. This year I was chair of the technical and design track so I really didn't get much of a chance to see the expo floor or attend any of the sessions outside my room. I am catching up on what I missed in the other sessions on the event's Youtube channel  and the AR news site  AR Dirt . Here are some of my favorites I had a chance to see, but I...