If you've been salivating over Snapchat's Spectacles, the company's video-recording plaything unveiled back in September, you'll be pleased to know Vuzix's Blade 3000 series of upcoming smart glasses functions far beyond what Snapchat is poised to accomplish.
Similar smart glasses have not ambled well in the past, keenly exemplified by the lukewarm reception of the Google Glass, whose future still remains foggy. There are only a few companies developing smart glass at present, the most popular of which is Microsoft's HoloLens, hyped for quite some time now.
Save for the HoloLens, it's safe to assume that the development of augmented reality-capable smart glasses have been relegated to the back burner, leaving much of the technology stored for future resumption. However, Vuzix is seemingly willing to try to succeed where Google didn't, unveiling its AR-powered smart glasses named the Vuzix Blade 3000.
Vuzix Blade 3000 Specs
Vuzix announced that its new Vuzix Blade 3000 series of smart glasses will be showcased in next year's Consumer Electronics Show, or CES in January. These are smart glasses that will display a HUD containing information pulled from a paired smartphone.
Vuzix wants users to use the Blade 3000 hands-free, thus, it's claiming that these glasses will sport similar capabilities found in smartwatches today, eliminating the need to fish out your smartphone for doing relatively simple tasks.
Vuzix has its Cobra II display engine to thank for this vision, coupled with a see-through technology they call "waveguide optics." It allows the Blade 3000 to embed this information in your current visible environment such as maps, menus and weather information, very much like the Google Glass.
The smart glasses will come with an HD camera, a head-motion tracker, touch pad, noise-cancelling microphones and built-in batteries. If it works as intended, we're looking at very innovative smart glasses here, which could potentially have an inherent mainstream appeal, largely because it looks like a regular smart glass instead of a futuristic, fragile kludge. The Blade 3000 has already nabbed plenty of awards pre-CES, so it's slated to receive extra attention once it's properly showcased next year.
What You Can Do With The Vuzix Blade 3000
Basically all the things you can perform on a smartwatch can be performed with the Blade 3000. With Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity along with microphones with speech recognition, built-in, you'll be able to use social media, send messages and check notifications.
The Blade 3000 will run on Android on its internal processor, but it can be paired with Android or iOS smartphones. There's no pricing details as of yet, though don't hold your breath for an affordable price as these things are not expected to come cheap.
Luckily, CES is in the offing, and we'll get more coverage as the trade show draws nearer.
