Google may have gone back to the drawing board for a rethink of its Glass smart eyewear, but rivals are pressing on with their plans – including Sony, which has made its SmartEyeglass gadget available to pre-order in the UK and Germany.
Described as a “developer edition”, the SED-E1 eyewear will cost £620 when it goes on sale in March, at which point it will also be available in eight other countries. However, a version for non-developers won’t go on sale until 2016 at the earliest.
Sony is keen for developers to get their hands on (or, rather, eyeballs in) the glasses so they can start developing apps. The pre-order announcement was accompanied by the launch of a software development kit for SmartEyeglass, and a companion app released through Android’s Google Play store.
Sony’s device works differently to Google’s. Instead of a tiny display built into the frame of the glasses, it displays information across its “augmented reality lenses”, while promising not to obscure the wearer’s vision.
The SmartEyeglass includes motion and brightness sensors, a microphone and a three-megapixel camera. It ships with a handheld controller that connects to the glasses via cable, and it will also pair wirelessly with smartphones.
Sony’s claimed battery life of around 150 minutes when not using the camera or 80 minutes when using it shows the early nature of the product, as does the controller cable and the somewhat functional design.
The company appears to be in two minds about the likeliest target market for the SmartEyeglass. When the device was shown at the CES in January, the focus seemed to be professional uses, from warehouses and factories to medical and firefighting scenarios.
In its blog post announcing the pre-orders, though, Sony notes that when the device launches in March, there will be apps for consumer uses including Twitter, Facebook and Gmail. The SmartEyeglass product page also highlights sports viewing and tourism as potential uses.
SmartEyeglass isn’t Sony’s only product in the smart eyewear category. Also at CES, the company talked about its plans for an “attachable single-lens display module” designed to clip on to various non-smart glasses, with plans to start mass-producing them within a year.
Sony’s push into the smart eyewear market comes shortly after Google stopped producing Google Glass in its present form, moving its team out of the Google X incubator labs to become a separate division within the company. Google has since described the move as a chance for the Glass team to “reset” its strategy.
