Toshiba is all set to enter the smart glasses market. Owning a smart glass that lets you interact with your phone has been almost everyone’s secret dream but the only thing holding us back in fulfilling our dream has been its humongous price. Toshiba, it seems, has taken a note of this problem and come up with Toshiba glass, which is rumored to be much cheaper than the market leader Google glass.
The $1500 Google glass which is currently leading the wearable face computer space works by putting the guts of your Android Smartphone on your head so that it can project pictures, graphics, texts and videos etc. on a small prism just above the users eye.
Toshiba has showcased a prototype of the Toshiba Glass at the Ceatec trade show that was held in Japan in October this year. The Toshiba glass will have a tiny lightweight projector clipped onto one of its arms near the lens. The projector is central to the working of the glass as it displays an image that reflects off the inside of the lens to provide an augmented real type display. Toshiba glasses can be expected to hit the markets anytime in 2015.
Toshiba glass might not able to edge Google glass out of the market but it will surely give it a run for its money. The Toshiba glass works on almost the same principle as the Google glass, as both of them have in-built projectors but unlike the Google glass, the Smart glass by Toshiba don’t come with a prism over the lens to reflect the image into the eye. Instead, the glasses lens in Toshiba glass itself comprises of a series of narrow, vertical prisms. They are not at all visible when one looks straight through the lens of the device, but an image from an angle gets reflected back into the eye.
The Toshiba glass is impressive but it is still a several miles away from its competitor Google glass. First of all, the glasses are not wireless and needs to be connected to your Smartphone in order to function. According to Toshiba, this is because a separate battery for the projector would have made the glasses very heavy. Wearing a device with a cable connected to it 24/7 can act as a huge deal breaker for the Toshiba product. The second reason where Toshiba glass fails is that it isn’t a full blown computer. It works just as a display system that connects to your Android phone.
The glasses let the user interact with smartphone apps in a way that they might have only imagined but never thought would be possible. For example, you could get directions while driving, view health data while using fitness apps and view instructions while working in the field.
The Toshiba Glass will offer three types of frames-sporty, standard and industrial. The industrial frames will be like the goggles that one wears in a laboratory.
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