CEO of Vuzix, Paul Travers presented the keynote speech at the Wearable Tech Expo in New York City on July 25th, highlighting the company’s M100 smart glasses. A competitor to the highly anticipated Google Glass headset, the M100 aims to be a hands-free display peripheral for your smartphone. Powered by an Android-based processor, the M100 will feature a color display, an integrated head tracker and GPS. An integrated camera enables video recording, still image capture and the potential for powerful augmented reality applications. Interactive tracking and an integrated camera, combined with newly developed applications on the M100 and a wireless link to the cloud, could provide an always-on augmented reality experience (imagine the world tagged with Wikipedia entries).
Of course, the Vuzix M100 smart glasses were included in our list of 2013 Technology Trends That Were Destined to Fail, as they are constrained by “battery and bandwidth”.
It seems apparent that despite regular improvement to both battery capabilities and network speed, the requirements on either or both of these are constantly a relatively fixed amount more than what is readily available — we can call that “Kaufman’s Hypothesis”.
the Architechnologist, Tech Trends of 2013 (and the two reasons they will fail), November 30, 2012
Travers announced the imminent shipping of the developer units of the M100 and the opening of the developer community for the smart glasses. Most M100 applications are written in the Java programming language (although native-code languages such as C and C++ can be reused with existing libraries) , making the field of potential developers substantial. The M100 and Android SDK and NDK tools are used compile the code (along with any data and resource files) into an Android package.
Application creators may join the Vuzix M100 developer community at developer.vuzix.com. Additional developer information may be requested from Ron Haidenger, the Director of Developer Services at Vuzix, via email at: [email protected].
