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Now you only have to barely move your hand to control your smart glasses
One main obstacle to making smart glasses mainstream is their awkward control methods, but that may change courtesy of Thalmic Labs, the maker of the $149 Myo muscle-sensing armband due in this fall. With the help of several enterprise partners, the startup has managed to integrate its futuristic wearable with Google Glass, Epson Moverio and Recon Jet, thus allowing users to quickly flick through documents, contacts and apps with subtle hand plus finger gestures, as opposed to fiddling with a tiny trackpad. In the videos after the break, it seems that there's great potential for the Myo in the medical space, heavy industries plus outdoor sports, albeit at the risk of making the users look a little silly.
APX Labs mods Epson Moverio headset, adds camera, mic and motion sensors for improved AR
Epson's 3D display glasses, the Moverio BT-100 have been floating around as a development platform for a couple years, and APX Labs is the latest to hack the headset. APX Labs is a software firm best known for creating Terminator Vision augmented reality tech for the US military, and it decided to use the BT-100 as a vehicle to develop and showcase a smart glasses platform it's built to work for both business and consumer applications. In order to get the functionality it needed, APX grafted a 5 megapixel camera, mic and a full suite of motion sensors to provide nine-axis head tracking onto a Moverio headset.%Gallery-187866% All that gear is shoved into a 3D-printed module and attached to the BT-100 to turn it into a pair of smart glasses. In addition to the cameras and sensors, APX also hacked an Epson daughter board onto the Moverio's controller to allow an HDMI video feed from a smartphone to be shown on the displays. This result? A system that understands where you are, what you're seeing and hearing and a UI that allows users to glean information from the world around them using voice commands and head gestures. That should sound familiar to fans of Google Glass, but by using Epson's binocular displays, these smart glasses can convey depth in a way Mountain View's monocle cannot. (Not to mention that Glass doesn't even do AR apps... yet). The hardware we got to see was a crude prototype built for demo purposes only, but the software platform shows promise and Epson's got a version two Moverio headset in the works -- so perhaps you can see a bit of the future of smart glasses in the video after the break.
