Sony Taking Pre-Orders for Developer Edition Smart Glasses
Google shelved its Glass Explorer program last month, but that’s not stopping Sony from moving forward with its SmartEyeglass project, announced in September. In a news release Tuesday, Sony said it has begun taking pre-orders for the SED-E1 SmartEyeglass Developer…
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Edition ($840) in Germany and the U.K., and that the glasses will be offered for sale there and in the U.S. and Japan beginning March 10 “to explore the possibilities” of the technology and “facilitate the development of apps for the device.” Sony is targeting consumer and commercial availability for 2016. The developer edition glasses will be offered for sale to enterprise customers in Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden beginning March 10 “to promote app development for industrial use,” Sony said. The glasses will be sold through the Sony Developer World application development support website, the company said. In addition to the hardware, Sony also will provide the official release of the software development kit for SmartEyeglass, an upgraded version of the Developer Preview SDK that has been available since September. Beyond glasses, Sony has sights on “the future of wearable devices and their diversifying use cases,” it said. Sony defines SmartEyeglass as transparent lens eyewear that connects with a smartphone running Android 4.4 or later. Sensors inside the 2.7-ounce glasses include a CMOS image sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, electronic compass, brightness sensor and mic, according to specs, and the glasses work with a smartphone’s GPS sensor to provide data “tailored to the user’s immediate circumstances,” the company said. Sony tapped its hologram optics technology for the lens, which achieves transparency of 85 percent at a thickness of 0.1 inch, it said. Consumer applications could include game play, display of social networking service messages during an event and delivery of sightseeing information in a tourist location, Sony said. In a disclaimer, Sony said potential use cases for this device are “under consideration, with app development, market research, and field testing still continuing.” Suggested use cases have not been tested or confirmed, it said.