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The MetaPro glasses do some pretty amazing things with augmented reality
Yeah, I went through the whole "not another wearable" thing when the folks from the Meta team showed up sporting an early prototype of a device tethered to a small animal-style backpack. But one rep started namedropping some of the parties involved in the AR glasses -- names like Steve Mann. The wearables pioneer now sports a "chief scientist" designation on the company's site. And while we would have preferred to have been first on the demo list, it's hard to complain when the ones ahead of you are people like Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak. In fact, as they set up the demo in the green room behind our CES stage, one employee pulled out a small, translucent vase, measuring an inch or so tall. "Paul Allen made that one," he said, handing it to me. For anyone who's ever spent time around a desktop 3D printer, it wasn't a particularly impressive artifact, more the sort of thing someone learning CAD might design in week two. What's impressive, of course, is how Allen designed it. The demo is really just a proof of concept for the technology, but it really drives home the connection between the real and the virtual that the device is bridging. A quick note about the hardware above, before we go any further: These being prototypes, they'll naturally look a fair bit slicker down the road than what you see. In fact, we're told that the final version of the MetaPro will look like a set of aviator glasses, with a little extra (including some wings on the side to help obscure some of the sensors. In fact, we've included a rendering of what that'll look like below.
Meta Pro promises Tony Stark-style computing with a $3,000 pair of sunglasses
As opposed to the rudimentary capabilities of the current king of wearables, Google Glass, a company called Meta is building a full-fledged augmented reality computing platform into a pair of aviator shades and a pocket computer. The platform aims to provide the kind of user experience heretofore seen only in Hollywood films -- think Tony Stark using J.A.R.V.I.S. in Iron Man. It's been about four months since we last touched base with Meta, and at the time, we saw a prototype headset and got a demo of the company's technology -- it was a good start to be sure, but the UI was far from ready for consumer use. Since then, Meta's been working hard to get its $667 Meta.01 developer kits ready, while also designing its first consumer set of specs set to ship in June: the $3,000 Meta Pro. The Pro is the first pair of smart glasses that stuffs the technology needed to enable Stark-esqe computing into the form factor Meta's founder, Meron Gribetz envisioned when he started the company -- something akin to a pair of Ray Bans. And, not only do these new glasses sport more fashionable frames than the dev hardware, but Gribetz promises us that they'll also have greater computing capabilities, too. So, when the company offered up the opportunity to learn more about the Pro and use a prototype headset in person at Meta's headquarters in Silicon Valley, we jumped at the chance.
