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Atheer Labs wants to make its augmented reality glasses a reality on Indiegogo
Atheer Labs isn't the only company chasing Tony Stark, but it is the very latest to offer a set of smart glasses to developers -- enabling them to build out 3D touchless gesture controlled apps. Like its competitor, Meta, Atheer wants to do away with restrictive conventional computing and replace it with augmented reality. The idea is to, eventually, combine your real and digital worlds seamlessly through the power of smart glasses and wearable computers. Unlike Meta, however, Atheer's using Android underpinnings, and will let users run regular Android applications on their faces while they wait for the 3D apps to arrive. As have many others, Atheer's chosen Indiegogo as the means to connect with code monkeys and get them building applications for its platform. And, with the launch of the funding campaign comes the revelation of both a dev kit and the company's first set of consumer specs, dubbed Atheer One. Folks willing to spend $850 for a developer kit now will get their hardware in March 2014. Early adopters wanting the One headset need only pay $350, but won't receive it until the end of next year. What you see above (dev kit on the right, Atheer One on the left) is close to what will make its way into backers' hands, but the hardware's not yet final.
Atheer Labs unveils 3D augmented reality mobile platform and a natural human UI (hands-on)
With the advent of Google Glass and the continued development of platforms like the Epson Moverio and Vuzix Smart Glasses, head-mounted wearables are getting a lot of attention these days. Atheer Labs is a small company looking to catch that wave of interest with a new set of intelligent spectacles and a novel way for folks to interact with them. What you see above is company founder Soulaiman Itani wearing Atheer's prototype device that delivers 3D augmented reality and implements what the company calls a "natural human interface." The hardware is still very much in the prototype stage, and the unit we saw was clearly a hand-built affair. It packs a pair of displays, a rechargeable battery, WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, plus an accelerometer, gyro and an IR camera into its relatively bulky frame -- so it's not not exactly a form factor ready for retail shelves. However, because of that bulk, it can function as a standalone device (it runs an an open source OS that runs Android apps), though it also has the ability to offload some processing to a smartphone.
