Google Glass Competitor Vuzix Poised To Beat Google To Market
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.