Pivothead live streaming and WiFi Drive hands-on (video)
If you thought live streaming was the obvious next step for the Pivothead video glasses, you're not alone. We, for one, thought it immediately upon donning the HD-recording eyewear and the company's Zach Barbitta couldn't agree more. The proud rep was on hand at tonight's Pepcom event demoing a brand new prototype accessory that will hopefully hit the market in three to five months and enable you to stream video straight from your 8MP sunglasses to the web, anywhere there's a WiFi signal. The device is so early in the development stage that we don't have many details about it. The final package should be roughly the size of a small portable hard drive -- tiny enough to slip into a pocket, provided you're not a skinny jeans fan. You'll have to connect it to the glasses via USB, which could potentially prove unwieldy, but we're sure some creative paths for passing the wire around your torso could easily solve that.
Despite being so young, the image quality for the stream was surprisingly good. The glasses had some trouble with the fluorescent lighting in the hall and subjects appeared a bit soft, but hardly offensively bad. And there's still a long time to go before the product is ready for primetime. In fact, the company isn't even sure yet if it'll stream 1080p video. File size may require that streams be limited to 720p, and there have even been internal discussions about enabling 480p in a future firmware update to favor consistency over image quality. The company also brought out its WiFi Drive accessory which gives you an easy way to extend the 8GB of internal storage and share your content with up to five other devices wirelessly. When it launches on July 5th for $99 you'll be able to turn it on and connect via WiFi to seamlessly stream video, photos or music from an SD card or the glasses, if they're connected via USB. There's also an Ethernet port, incase LAN is more your style. The device itself it relatively tiny and deceptively light, primarily as a product of its all plastic construction. But we're not concerned about its durability and those who like to capture a lot of footage will appreciate the simplicity of moving clips from the internal flash to an SD card. For more, check out the video below.
Edgar Alvarez contributed to this report.
