New glasses are ready for pre-order only for 3,000$
"Augmented reality startup Meta
has spent the past few years making prototypes of wearable devices
featuring see-through optics and a wide variety of sensor arrays. Now
it’s starting production on its
first generation of units for developers and taking pre-orders for a consumer-facing version of its product.
Meta
had previously pre-sold an earlier iteration of its wearable device,
called the META.01, which was designed to appeal to early adopters and
developers who wish to design for the platform. The META.01 was priced
at $667, as part of its effort to get developers on board with the
technology.
But they were also pretty crude in terms of what they
look like and how functional they are: The META.01s have to be plugged
into a computer to work, for instance, but that’s fine for now, since
they’re meant to be programmed on. They’re also pretty boxy and geeky
looking, but again, as a developer kit we’re talking about function over
form.
Here’s how my colleague Greg Kumparak described them:
To picture the Meta, picture a pair of glasses — or, more accurately in its current stage, a pair of safety goggles. Put a translucent, reflective surface in each eye piece, displaying images on top of your field of view
as piped out of a tiny projector built into each arm of the frames.
Take a couple tiny RGB/Infrared cameras — essentially a miniature Kinect
— and strap them to the frame. That’s the Meta.
Well, the META.01 units that were pre-ordered are now getting ready
to ship, which means the company believe it’s the right time to jump
into its second phase of production and create some
consumer demand for its product.
The consumer version of the glasses will be a lot sleeker — indeed,
I’ve seen an early prototype and they look a lot more like something
you’d actually wear out and about. But they’re also even more powerful
than the META.01 version that developers and early adopters got to play
with.
 |
| meta pro |
The display includes ultra-thin see-through optics with a 40-degree
field of vision. Each display is built to play 720p HD, and with two of
them, they’re aligned to display stereoscopic 3D. The sensor array will
include dual RGB video and
photo sensors, as well as nine-axis tracking with accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass included.
The combination of optics and sensors means that Meta and third-party
developers can overlay a whole bunch of interesting things into your
field of view that you can interact with. In addition to developing the
glasses, Meta’s also done a bunch of work creating software that can
recognize hand gestures and display video in 3D. If you haven’t seen a
demo yourself, again, read Greg’s post about the capabilities.
To make it all work, Meta has put some serious technology under the
hood. The Meta Pro will ship with an i5 CPU, 4GB of RAM, 128 GB of
storage, Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity. The whole package
will cost $3,000, and the company hopes to ship by June.
Google Glass might be the first really functional wearable display
technology, but Meta is hoping to do a lot more. And for double the
price, it should. The Meta Pro has 15x the display of Google Glass, and
runs 3-D instead of just 2-D. Its optics are thinner, at 2mm vs 5mm, and
its sensors recognize hand gestures, which makes control a lot easier
than touching the side of your face.
Then again, Google Glass isn’t the only competitor out there. Oculus VR just raised $75 million to bring its virtual reality goggles to the masses. And it already has 42,000 developer units out in the wild.
It’ll take some time for augmented and virtual reality to become
mainstream, let alone to determine who wins that space. In the meantime,
the new Meta Pro wearables look like an attractive choice for early
adopters."
by Ryan Lawler
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