goggles – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "goggles"

DailyDirt: High Tech And Rose-Colored Glasses

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Virtual reality or augmented reality goggles are getting a lot of hype, but some of us who need to wear glasses all the time just to see normally are probably not looking forward to wearing bulky electronics on top of regular eyeglasses. Unfortunately, VR/AR goggles tend to cater to people with 20/20 vision first, and then provide some footnote about how corrective lenses might be compatible in the future. Well, if we’re all going to be wearing glasses someday, how about making them a bit more useful?

• Eyeglasses that autofocus in real time for people with vision problems like presbyopia sounds useful enough. Deep Optics says it’ll be 2 years before its prototypes are ready for extensive real world testing, and we had mentioned PixelOptics EmPower before, but it looks like that company had some problems with its glasses and couldn’t recover. [url]
• Can orange-colored glasses have an effect on how well you sleep? Everyone seems to have bought into the idea that blue light is bad at night (hence the Night Shift mode for more phones), but wearing glasses to block out blues all day seems like overkill — and it probably doesn’t address the real problems of not getting enough sleep to begin with. [url]
• Maybe you’ve heard of pinhole glasses as a treatment for nearsightedness? Okay, pinhole glasses can work in a limited way (blocking most of your field of vision while you use them), but they’re not a cure for anything. Looking through a pinhole (or any small aperture) can work if you’re really in a bind, but it’s not really an alternative to regular glasses/contacts/LASIK/etc. [url]

After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: eyesight, glasses, goggles, lenses, myopia, nearsightedness, night shift, optics, pinhole glasses, presbyopia, vision
Companies: deep optics, pixeloptics

Prototype Goggles Make Sure You Never Lose Your Keys Again

from the where-did-I-put-my... dept

We’ve seen a whole bunch of different technology companies (and government agencies) experimenting with various projects that would allow people to wear a camera that would record everything they see and hear, as a sort of backup memory or backup brain. All of these projects are in the (completely) experimental stage, but some researchers in Japan may have come up with a nice little app to go along with them. It’s a prototype system that supposedly can recognize the different objects you see. The current version requires you to go around and train the system (i.e., “this is my iPod… these are my keys… this is my mobile phone”) and then it uses some recognition technologies to make a note every time you “see” one of those items. Then, if you happen to have lost something, you can just ask the system “where are my keys?” and it will play back the video of the last time you saw your keys. Depending on how well this works, it sounds quite cool. And, of course, the idea is to go much further, hitting “Terminator”-type levels of information display, including what kinds of flowers are you looking at and who is the person you’re talking to. Sounds like a wonderful solution for people who can’t remember anyone’s name. Of course, like all the other projects of this nature, it doesn’t sound likely that this will be hitting the market any time soon.

Filed Under: backup brain, goggles, item recognition