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Meta's augmented reality glasses are almost ready for developers
With all the attention Meta has been giving its $3,000 smart glasses prototype, you'd be forgiven if you thought the company and let its original Kickstarter design fall to the wayside. Forgiven, but wrong. Last May, the firm asked developers to help it build the world's most advanced augmented reality solution, promising developer kits for roughly half the price of Google's glass. Now that unit is almost ready to ship out -- we dropped by the company's booth at Augmented Reality Expo to see how it's shaped up.
Meta and Steve Mann want to mediate your reality for $667
"Demo or die." That's the unofficial motto of Meta and it's a bedrock principle espoused by Raymond Lo, the company's CTO. Lo spent a decade under the tutelage of Professor Steve Mann (known to many as the father of wearable computing), and is one of the few to make it through Mann's Ph.D. program at the University of Toronto. As an instructor, Mann requires tangible results on a regular basis from his students' projects, and now, with Lo as CTO and Mann as chief scientist, Meta's operating with the same ethos as it develops augmented mediated reality headsets. Meta's idea is to meld the real and the digital together in a fully functional computing environment. It wants to augment your reality, and, in fact, mediate it. We saw a prototype mediated reality headset from Meta a couple months ago, where we witnessed some rudimentary demos: typing in thin air and grabbing and moving digital objects with our hands. Naturally, the company's made some improvements in the interim. The latest prototype hardware has morphed into a slightly more integrated design, but it still has the boxy and rough appearance of a 3D-printed prototype. Which, of course, it is. The Kinect-stuck-atop-a-pair-of-Rec Specs look is only temporary however, as Meta is finally ready to start taking orders for its first production headset, the Meta.01. You can pre-order one for $667.00 on Meta's website, with deliveries set to begin in November. As opposed to the prototype you see in the image above, renders of the commercial device look like a cross between ski goggles and a pair of Oakleys. The magic of Meta doesn't lie in its looks, however.
Hands-on with Meta 1, a 3D augmented reality headset with a natural UI (video)
Augmented reality is the future, or at least the proliferation of AR apps and hardware seems to indicate that'll be the case. Meta revealed its own augmented reality device, called Meta 1, in January and is currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to ramp up manufacturing and get it to the people. If the headset looks familiar, that's because its hardware is: it's comprised, in no small part, of Epson and SoftKinetic gear. It utilizes the 960 x 540 binocular 3D displays from Epson's Moverio glasses and the depth sensor sitting atop them comes from SoftKinetic. Of course the glasses you see are but a first generation and are wired to a battery pack worn around the waist -- the company's currently working on slimming things down with customized eyewear that'll be revealed later this year, however. For now, the dev kit and the still-in-development Unity-based SDK are slated to ship in September, but we got to see some of what Meta 1 can do a bit early.
University of Toronto student tech shoots HDR video in real-time (eyes-on)
Sure, you love the HDR pictures coming from your point-and-shoot, smartphone or perhaps even your Glass. But what if you want to Hangout in HDR? An enterprising grad student from the University of Toronto named Tao Ai -- under the tutelage of Steve Mann -- has figured out how to shoot HDR video in real-time. The trick was accomplished using a Canon 60D DSLR running Magic Lantern firmware and an off-the-shelf video processing board with a field programmable gate array (FPGA), plus some custom software to process the video coming from the camera. It works by taking in a raw feed of alternatively under and over exposed video and storing it in a buffer, then processing the video on its way to a screen. What results is the virtually latency-free 480p resolution HDR video at 60 frames per second seen in our video after the break. When we asked whether higher resolution and faster frame rate output is possible, we were told that the current limitations are the speed of the imaging chip on the board and the bandwidth of the memory buffer. The setup we saw utilized a relatively cheap $200 Digilent board with a Xilinx chip, but a 1080p version is in the works using a more expensive board and DDR3 memory. Of course, the current system is for research purposes only, but the technology can be applied in consumer devices -- as long as they have an FPGA and offer open source firmware. So, should the OEM's get with the program, we can have HDR moving pictures to go with our stationary ones.
Visualized: a history of augmented and virtual reality eyewear
We've seen the prototypes that led Google to Glass, but there are many devices that predate Mountain View's smart specs, and Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California was able to gather and display a historic number of such headsets this week. From Steve Mann's handmade WearComp 1 and EyeTap prototypes to Glass-like precursors from Optinvent and Vuzix, it's quite the comprehensive collection -- over thirty devices in all. While they may make their way into a museum some day, we're bringing pictures of them all to your screen right now. Enjoy.
Editorial: Engadget on EyeTap, Project Glass and the future of wearable cameras
Summer in Paris -- you can't walk a block on Champs-Élysées without locking eyes with at least one camera-equipped tourist. But Steve Mann's shooter wasn't dangling from his shoulder and neck; it was mounted on his head, with a design strikingly similar to Google's Project Glass. Unlike that mainstream Mountain View product, however, Mann's version has reportedly been around in one form or another for 34 years, and was designed with the objective of aiding vision, rather than capturing stills and video or providing a bounty of database-aided readouts. It's also street-ready today. While on vacation with his family, the Ontario-based "father of wearable computing" was sporting his EyeTap as he walked down the aforementioned French avenue, eventually entering a McDonald's to refuel after a busy day of sightseeing. He left without his ranch wrap, but with seriously damaged hardware. What allegedly occurred inside the restaurant is no doubt a result of the increasing presence and subsequent awareness of connected cameras, ranging from consumer gear to professional surveillance equipment. As Mann sat to eat, he writes that a stranger approached him then attempted to pull off his glasses, which, oddly, are permanently affixed to his skull. The man, at that point joined by one other patron and someone that appeared to be a McDonald's employee, then pushed Mann out of the store and onto the street. As a result of the attack, the eyewear malfunctioned, resulting in the three men being photographed. It wouldn't be terribly difficult for police to identify those involved, but this encounter may have greater implications. McDonalds has since launched an investigation into the matter and seems to be denying most of the claims, but it'll be some time yet before the full truth is uncovered. Still, the whole ordeal got us at Engadget thinking -- is the planet ready for humans to wear video recorders, and will it ever shake a general unease related to the threat of a world filled with omnipresent cameras? Join us past the break for our take.
