“No person needs to appear like the man who simply stepped off the Starship Enterprise,” Paul Travers, the president of AR eyewear maker Vuzix tells me. 

He’s being well mannered right here, so I’ll say what he received’t: It’s onerous to put on present VR and AR headsets for greater than an hour. They’re heavy! Microsoft’s Hololens is admittedly neat, however at a pound and a half, it’s loads of headgear to put on round. And Magic Leap is cool, certain, however they give the impression of being odd once you’re sporting them.

Vuzix has the reply. At CES 2023, the corporate unveiled new Ultralite AR glasses, ordinary-looking plastic frames with a tiny projector tucked in a single stem and a tiny battery and Bluetooth radio within the different. Mix that with Vuzix’s waveguides – a layer within the glasses that bends the projector’s mild into your line of sight – and also you’ve received ordinary-looking glasses that do the extraordinary.

I placed on the Vuzix Ultralite, and noticed within the nook of the best lens a line of inexperienced textual content, the type you’d see on previous mainframe computer systems within the film Battle Video games. It was sharp, completely readable, and vivid as day. It was a real-time transcription of what one other Vuzix staffer was saying; the system is equally adept at displaying instructions, with arrows to point the place you need to journey, exercise standing, textual content messages, and so forth.

This isn’t, to be clear, 30 fps full-color video. That expertise additionally exists, from an Israeli firm referred to as Lumus. Nevertheless it’s at the least two years out, the corporate advised me, and attributable to prices, when it arrives it’s prone to present up in a monocular software. (Which means a single lens of your glasses, though when you’re into monocles, I suppose they may make one.)

However the Vuzix Ultralite is right here as we speak, and it’s precisely what I’ve been on the lookout for. It doesn’t have a large battery pack (or a wire to a battery you shove in your pocket) as a result of it really works immediately together with your telephone, due to a easy Bluetooth connection. It’s not passing an excessive amount of video throughout that connection, so there’s no want for that cable both. It’s only a pair of ordinary-looking glasses that faucet into the facility of your telephone.

“This telephone has wonderful capabilities,” Travers factors out. Why attempt to recreate that? “As an illustration, speech-language translation. You can be talking French and I’ve received the glasses on and it’s all in English within the lenses.” Stick a microphone within the lenses and you’ll utterly work together together with your telephone as properly.

“We’ve been at this for 26 years,” Travers advised me. His firm has been doing waveguides ceaselessly and manufacturing them right here in the US at a facility in Rochester, New York. “Again within the day, the Particular Forces guys requested us, ‘Are you able to make Oakley-style sun shades with computer systems in them?’ As a result of we would like that and we name it the Oakley Gaze. Half the U.S. navy would purchase this stuff when you may do this … In order that’s been a spotlight for us.”

The US authorities lately gave Microsoft a half-billion-dollar contract for Hololens. In the meantime, this exists. Maybe the federal government ought to have held out?

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