Google Glass Competitor Vuzix Poised To Beat Google To Market

For as much attention Google Glass has received, due in part to appearing on the face of Google co-founder Sergey Brin at high-profile events such as a New York fashion show, Vuzix Corporation’s M100 Smart Glasses may quietly be beating Google to market. Indeed, Vuzix expects its M100 Smart Glasses to ship in the second half of this year.

Slightly less silly-looking than Google Glass, the M100 glasses run on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and feature a color display with a 16:9 aspect ratio, a 16-degree field of view, and about 2000 nits of brightness. Under the (very tiny) hood is a 1GHz OMAP4430 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 4GB of flash storage with a microSD slot for additional storage.


There’s also a 720p HD video camera, USB, power/select/volume up/down buttons, an ear speaker, a noise-cancelling microphone, and WiFi and Bluetooth for connectivity to the cloud. The hands-free glasses can communicate with iOS and Android devices to augment the use of smartphones, and they can be mounted in multiple ways, including over-the-head or over either eye. Spatial awareness technology, including GPS and head-tracking capabilities, helps the wearer with view orientation and enables augmented reality applications.


We don’t know what the Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses will cost, but we imagine that a certain number of users won’t care how high the price is. Google Glass may (or may not) be coming this spring, and we do know that they’ll retail for about $1500 each. Here’s to some healthy competition in wearable computing this year.