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More than Meets the Eye
Eyewear that augments reality hitting the market
Cover Story
24 | MAY/JUNE 2012 | MICROmanufacturing
While the young man goes about the
business of a normal day, all kinds of
useful information—weather reports, walking
directions, travel alerts, appointment reminders,
messages from friends—appears right before his
eyes on the lenses of his glasses.
Pretty cool, right? Want to buy a pair? Sorry,
but you can’t—not yet, at least.
The above isn’t a description of the capabilities
of an actual product. Instead, it’s a partial
description of a video (available on YouTube) that
shows what might be possible someday as a result
of Google’s recently announced Project Glass.
Google’s announcement generated a buzz
about eyewear that supplements reality with
virtual content. The idea is to free up the hands
of wearers by delivering information directly
to their eyes. Such products have traditionally
been rather bulky and visually unappealing.
Today, however, Google and other companies
are trying to deliver added viewing content with
light, compact and stylish eyewear.
In addition to serving as the basis for
consumer products such as Google glasses,
this technology could be useful in commercial,
industrial, medical and military settings. For
By William Leventon, Contributing Editor
Innovega
The iOptik augmented reality system from Innovega combines contact lenses and glasses (see page 29).
The wearer sees both the surrounding environment and images projected onto the holographic lenses of
the glasses, as shown in this simulation.
example, it might be configured to show scenes
that include a real-world view as well as selected
virtual elements that help people do certain jobs.
So, with the right glasses, you would see
information about a task displayed right in the
task space, while your hands would be free to
do the work, noted Blair MacIntyre, director of
Georgia Tech’s Augmented Environments Lab.
MacIntyre differentiates between the
hypothetical Google glasses, which would
support a “heads-up display” (HUD) of
potentially useful information, and future
iterations of the technology that might support
true augmented reality (AR), enabling users to
view superimposed information and images.
“People who need access to virtual information
while using their hands for something else
can use HUDs,” MacIntyre said. Instructions
presented to machinists, “to-do” lists for
shopkeepers or cooks and detailed order-status
lists for waiters are just a few examples.
Also, context-sensitive information could be
presented to nurses and doctors in hospitals
via HUDs, such as 2-D lists of medical chart
information that might currently be displayed
on a tablet computer. In a true AR device,