ORA-X Smart Eyeglasses Give Google Glass a Run for Its Money

Optinvent ORA-X

Google Glass is indisputably the most popular piece of wearable tech around, but its steep price and scarce availability make it quite unattractive. Those are exactly the aspects France-based eye-display technology company Optinvent counted on when developing the $300 ORA-X smart glasses.

The bad news is that ORA-X will only be available next summer, and for the time being, the French company only plans to offer the ORA-1 smart glasses to developers in January 2015. There are a lot of ifs and whens in the equation, as even the developer version is conditioned by the success of a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. I guess that’s one of the many things that distinguishes Mountain View from Google-wannabes: certainty.

Unlike Google Glass, which provides useful information in the form of a minimalistic overlay, wearing ORA-X is said to be similar to wearing a tablet in front of your eyes at all times. I don’t know about you, but I would find that terribly distracting.

Flip-Vu, one of the proprietary features of the ORA-X smart glasses, adds an augmented reality layer over the wearer’s field of view. In glance mode, the alternative to Flip-Vu, the virtual layer is facing downwards, and doesn’t inconvenience the wearer that much. The glasses can also act as a standalone Android 4.2.2. (soon to have KitKat) device, so Optinvent is not that independent from Google.

While the 5MP camera and the GPS sensor are nice touches, the battery life is terrible, but this seems to be a common problem with wearables. Intensive use will drain the battery in 2 hours, while using it in a normal regime will get 7 hours out of it. If your work somehow depends on these smart glasses, make sure you’re near a power outlet.

In terms of connectivity, the usual suspects are present, namely Bluetooth 4.0 LE and Wi-Fi.

It’s quite hard to tell whether the project will get funded or not on Kickstarter, as the campaign has just taken off, and at press time there were 57 more days to go with $17,116 of the $100K needed for mass-producing this wearable. As mentioned above, the ORA-X will be available for $300 in June 2015, should the campaign be successful, while the ORA-1 developers’ edition will cost $599 for early birds and $649/699 for regular backers.

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the smart glasses that enable nurses to see through your skin, and the Atheer One smart glasses that enable 3D interaction with Android apps.

Optinvent Ora AR glasses boasts ‘Flip-Vu’ dual position display, aims to take on Google (hands-on)

Optinvent Ora AR glasses boasts 'true AR' and dual position display, dev edition to go for 700 Euros headon

While Google Glass might be the darling of the augmented reality wearable market, other companies like Vuzix and Epson have had skin in the game for much longer than the folks in Mountain View. One such firm to have caught the AR bug early is Optinvent, which debuted an early version of its ClearVu head-mounted display way back in 2009. Fast forward to 2013, and Optinvent is ready to move on to the final production stage of what it's now calling the Ora, which it hopes will give Google Glass a run for its money, not just with superior optics but a softer blow to the wallet as well. We had a chance to sit down with CEO Kayvan Mirza at the Glazed conference in San Francisco, where we learned more about the Ora and had a chance to try it on ourselves.

One of the first things Mirza told us was that the Ora offers "true AR," which overlays the entire display in front of your eyes much like a heads-up display unit. This is unlike Glass, which he says offers more of a "companion display" where you have to look up to view it. Don't be concerned about the Ora completely blocking your sight however, as it has a very unique feature we've yet to see in wearable optics. It's called Flip-Vu, and it lets you pivot the display downward into what's called dashboard or glance mode so that it's now more of a companion display rather than one that dominates your entire field of vision (You can see a demo video of this after the break). Mirza says glancing downward is a much more natural position than looking up, as we tend to look down at our phones and other devices anyway.%Gallery-slideshow99628%

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Source: Optinvent