Tag Archives: spectacles

Xiaomi just announced its Augmented Reality Smart Glasses… and the timing couldn’t be more interesting!

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Doesn’t it strike you as odd that Xiaomi would randomly drop such a massive product teaser just a day before Apple’s September event? And hold their own even a day AFTER Apple announced the new iPhone? I’m not an expert analyst, but it seems like they’re trying to beat Apple to the punch, given that a lot of people are expecting Apple to launch their own smart glasses soon. The announcement a day before and the event a day after Apple’s California Streaming event is just Xiaomi’s way of rolling its sleeves up and trying to grab the news cycle by its horns before Apple floods the internet. Moreover, the Smart Glasses also end up firing shots at Facebook, who just announced their own camera-enabled wayfarers with RayBan. Gossip and speculation aside, here’s what the Xiaomi Smart Glasses are all about.

Designed to look like a regular pair of eyewear, Xiaomi’s Smart Glasses actually come with a holographic display built into them. The tiny MicroLED display (which Xiaomi says is smaller than a grain of rice) is built into the temple stem, and reflects a simple UI onto the right eyepiece of the glasses. The specially crafted eyepiece uses a series of microscopic “optical waveguides” to project the display into your eye, allowing only you to see the augmented reality elements when you wear the glasses.

The Smart Glasses come with a rather bare-basics interface, although it’s still incredibly advanced for its time (not to mention the fact that Xiaomi managed to fit all this technology into a ridiculously slim piece of eyewear). The holographic display can display messages, alerts, notifications, and time, although Xiaomi’s most impressive flex was showcasing a live translate feature, that took an English food menu and overlaid the Chinese translations on top of it. Aside from the MicroLED holographic display, the Smart Glasses also come with a camera lens that captures the world around you, allowing you to not just take pictures, but also analyze images and text. Whether all that live translation and processing power happens within the spectacles themselves is yet to be determined, although we can expect much more information on the 15th, when Xiaomi holds its product event.

For now, the Smart Glasses are just a concept teaser with no price, no tech specs, and no foreseeable launch date.

This ‘car-wash’ for your spectacles will wipe fingerprints and dust off your lenses to give you crystal clear vision

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If you remember the crowdfunded ‘washing-machine’ for your AirPods from a few months ago, this one should seem like a slightly familiar product that’s potentially a lot more useful. More than 70% of all adults wear spectacles – prescription or sunglasses (that number’s going to go even higher after Apple debuts their Smart Glasses), but it seems like the only solution we’ve got to actually cleaning them involves using the corner of your shirt or clothing to wipe the lenses clean. However, your cotton tee wasn’t designed to wipe glass… in fact, chances are your cotton tee is actually damaging the glass by scratching it or eroding the coating on the lenses. Meet the LensHD, a ‘car-wash’ for your spectacles that wipes them down and practically buffs the lenses clean so you’ve got spotless, clear vision.

The LensHD is basically a one-stop cleaning station for all your spectacles. Whether they’re regular glasses or bifocals, sunglasses or nerdy glasses, the LensHD will clean all of them. The universal spectacle-cleaning gadget is roughly the size of a Bluetooth speaker, and comes with four strategically placed cleaning sponges that wipe down pretty much any sort of dirt off your lenses. The sponges rotate on a slightly offset axis, allowing them to effectively wipe down your glasses without leaving so much as a spot behind, and they’re covered with a microfiber cloth that’s easy on the lenses but tough on stains.

Click Here to Buy Now: $79 $89 (11% off) Hurry! Only 3 days left!

As a specs-wearer myself, I can’t really overstate how cool this machine is… although it isn’t quite as portable and cheap as using that microfiber cloth that comes inside your spectacle-case. However, it does a measurably better job at completely removing stains of all kinds – fingerprints, dust, drops, grease, etc. without damaging your spectacles. Just spritz the sponges with cleaning fluid, pop your spectacles in, and shut the lid, and the LensHD gets to work. The blade-shaped sponges begin rotating on either side of the lenses, wiping them clean from inside as well as the outside; and they move upwards, downwards, and sideways too, working with larger lenses and square-shaped spectacles too.

The LensHD’s patent-pending design is compact enough to easily fit on your desk or your bedside table. It charges via USB-C and can run for multiple cycles without needing a recharge. The internal sponge-discs are removable and washable under running water, and if you’ve got an entire arsenal of spectacles to clean, the sponges can be periodically replaced too. The little gizmo retails for a special early-bird price of $79 with a delivery date of November 2021. The project’s garnered over 3,300 supporters as of writing this article, which is pretty much a testament to how many people wear spectacles… and how many of them are tired of having dust, stains, and fingerprint smudges on their lenses.

Designer: LensCleaner

Click Here to Buy Now: $79 $89 (11% off) Hurry! Only 3 days left!

If Apple ever designed prescription glasses, they’d probably look like these…

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Sleek, bezel-less, and functional. No, I’m not talking about tech, I’m talking about Lance Air’s glasses. These slim, rimless beauties aren’t just your standard pair of prescription frames… they’re products of the digital age. Just the way Apple reinvented the phone, Lance Air is putting its spin on spectacles by making them incredibly slick extensions of your own body. Lance Air’s glasses are lightweight, durable, and are designed for a world surrounded by screens. The lenses fitted into the frames come prescription-ready and are coated with a blue-light filter and an anti-glare film to protect your eyes from overexposure to screens. The lenses are also made to be scratch-resistant, smudge-resistant, dust-repellent, and perhaps the most important feature yet, anti-fog… which means you could wear that face-mask without worrying about condensation fogging your vision.

The Lance Air reinvents spectacles, bringing them into the digital age. The addition of the word Air to the end of the name seems like a rather fun tech-inspired flair (sort of like the MacBook Air or the iPad Air), implying lightness. This lightness is brought about by the use of incredible materials that make the Lance Air spectacles razor-thin yet surprisingly resilient. Crafted from beta-titanium, Lance Air’s frames are designed to be flexible yet still have shape-memory, allowing them to bend and twist but never break. And the idea to make the Lance Air rimless is a clever one too! Referencing the consumer-tech world’s obsession with edge-to-edge displays, Lance Air brings that very same philosophy to its glasses and lenses! Lance Air’s ‘bezel-less’ glasses have the same kind of allure and appeal that edge-less infinity screens on smartphones and other smart devices have. They’re, for all intents and purposes, made to be sleek and futuristic, leaving the clunky acetate frames in the past and ushering in the age of ‘smart’ glasses designed for life around smart devices and screens. The Lance Air frames come in 6 different styles with 5 metal colors and infinite customization as far as the lenses themselves go. You can choose between single-vision, progressive, and plano lenses, and if you want them tinted, you’ve got an additional 6 colors to choose from. Lance gives you the option of using your phone’s AR feature to try the frames out before you choose a pair that suits your face, and when the frames eventually do reach you, they’ll come along with a complimentary protective carry-case in a sleek white box with an unboxing experience that should put most smartphones to shame!

Designer: Lance Team

Click Here to Buy Now: $89 $129 ($40 off). Hurry, only 9/1471 left! Raised over $270,000.

Lance Air – Your Everyday Smart Luxury Glasses

The Lance Air glasses are timeless, light designs, suitable for wearing every day, all day long without feeling any discomfort: no margins, no harmful blue light, no eye-strain.

Flexible – Smart Metal – Say goodbye to easily breakable, heavy, uncomfortable frames.

More Than Simple Glasses

All of the frames’ arms are made of flexible beta-titanium. Two of the designs, Monceau & Nouvel, are entirely made of beta-titanium, ensuring total flexibility, even for the bridge.

Different Uses of Lance Air Glasses

Using advanced optical software and industry-leading machinery, Lance can handle the most complicated corrections with an extraordinary level of accuracy and optical clarity, including digital free-form lenses.

Ultra Fade Lenses

This lens technology adapts to the condition of the light around you with 100% UV protection. Essentially this means you have 2 pairs of glasses in 1! If you add progressives then you have 4 glasses in 1 along with the blue light filter.

Super Sharp Lenses

Reduce the glare and see 10x times better than before. Lance Air Glasses will help you improve your sleep, reduce headaches due to the long screen hours and maximize your focus while boosting your life quality.

Correction Lenses

You’ll be able to fill in your prescription and choose your desired lenses, either Sharp or Fade. Their prescriptions cover values from 0 to +/-8 as well as progressive lenses.

Nanotechnology Coatings





The nanotechnology coatings are acting as a shield against blue light coming from your daily exposure to screens. The main source of HEV light in our lives is the harmful blue-violet light emitted by our digital screens. From TVs to tablets, computers to phones, we’re constantly exposing ourselves to the unnatural blue light. Having Sharp Lenses on your Lance Air Glasses will limit the amount of blue light that enters your eyes, making your screen time more pleasant.

Virtual Try Mirror





Check out Lance’s Instagram and try your favorite frames through their Virtual Try Mirror. You’ll definitely find the one that suits you best.

Details

Lookbook

Click Here to Buy Now: $89 $129 ($40 off). Hurry, only 9/1471 left! Raised over $270,000.

Oakley finally designed a spectacle-friendly N95 mask that prevents your glasses from fogging up

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It’s obviously in Oakley’s best interests to make face-masks that accommodate spectacles! Considering that more than 75% of the human adult population wears spectacles, and that fogged glasses can be such a deterring factor when it comes to masks, the opportunity to make a spectacles-friendly mask has been around for quite some time. As a pioneer in the eyewear (and sportswear) industry, Oakley was perfectly positioned to tackle this problem head-on, and I’m sort of surprised they didn’t launch this sooner! Meet the MSK3, a face-mask with replaceable N95 filters, and a dedicated eyewear channel along the nose that lets you comfortably wear spectacles without them fogging up.

The Oakley MSK3 is a clever solution to a largely ignored problem. The mask comes with a mesh front that looks stylish and basically gives you the feeling of breathability, while a high-performance, disposable filter sits behind it, giving you over 95% filtration efficiency of particles down to the size of 0.3 microns. Adjustable straps allow you to calibrate the mask to the size of your face, while the MSK3’s most innovative feature, the redesigned nose-bridge, ensures a perfect seal around the nasal area. The silicone nose-bridge also has a dedicated eyewear channel – a thin strip that lets you perfectly wear your specs over your mask, sealing the nasal area. This seal ensures that A. your spectacles don’t slip off while running or jogging, and B. exhaled air doesn’t leak from the area around your nose, fogging your glasses. The result is a mask that’s impeccably designed to solve the one MAJOR problem nobody thought of solving… and sure, you can look at the product from Oakley’s obvious profit angle, but then again, if it means a better, safer, and more comfortable mask-wearing experience for me and 75% of all adults, I guess that’s a pretty remarkable achievement too!

Designer: Oakley

These ergonomic glasses were designed specifically for Black People’s wider nose profiles

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It’s weird to think that a design as basic and universal as spectacles or sunglasses can have a racial bias. The truth, however, is that like almost every product you see, spectacles often are designed for the default human, which is, in most cases, a caucasian male or female. Spectacle brand Reframd is correcting that racial bias by designing spectacles specifically for the facial profiles of Black people. The eyewear takes into account the placement and shape of the nose in relation to the eyes – features that distinctly set all races apart.

Most black people have much wider noses, causing spectacles to either pinch the nose-bridges or sit at a slightly higher level, resulting in distorted vision. “At some point, I realized the problem wasn’t with me or my face, but with the product itself,” says Ackeem Ngwenya, product designer and founder of Reframd. “It became clear that the product was not made for people like me, and that I could do something to change that.” The company was founded a mere 5 years ago, although Ngwenya says it’s rooted in years’ worth of “personal frustrations” and an “unwillingness to just accept the world as it is”.

Reframd’s range of spectacles feature a wider nose-bridge, and smaller lens-rings spaced further apart. Reframd works by using a parametric algorithm that runs in a 3D program. Put simply, customers use the front-facing camera on their smartphones to capture their “face landmarks”, reports DesignWeek “Essentially, it’s a pair of glasses that adapt in response to different inputs such as head width, bridge height, pantoscopic tilt, temple length, and more,” says Ngwenya. “These parameters drive frame creation for a particular person and that frame is then sent to our production partner and made for the customer.” This allows each frame to be custom-made for its wearer, ensuring a more personally-suited pair of spectacles that prioritize comfort and break the racial bias around the notion that a product can simply be made to ‘universally’ serve everyone, including people that weren’t considered during its design process.

Designer: Reframd

These new Snapchat Goggles use a more classic circular frame with dual camera-lenses

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These whimsical pair of spectacles aren’t your average eyesight-correcting instruments. They’re built for a more socially engaging purpose. The Snap Goggles are the spiritual successor to the Snap Spectacles from Snapchat. Designed as a concept by Scandinavian-studio Swift Creatives, the Snap Goggles give the original Spectacles a design refresh, with a more contemporary-yet-funky circular frame, complete with a dual-color palette.

The Snap Goggles come with tinted eyeglasses, but unlike in the original Snap Spectacles, these glasses don’t have the dual-camera lenses cutting into the eyepieces. Instead, the tinted circular eyepieces exist independently, with the two camera lenses resting on the end of the temple-stems. The result is a pair of spectacles that look funky yet contemporary, with the camera lenses being placed slightly further apart, but in a manner that makes much more sense visually.

The AR Goggles operate almost exactly like their predecessors, but come with the ability to view the Snap effects right inside the glasses (instead of on your phone). The eyepieces are, in fact, transparent displays, giving you the ability to see the holographic projections inside the glasses themselves. The glasses power on as soon as the temple stems are opened, allowing contact points on the stem and the frame to connect and boot the spectacles. Obviously, the Snap Goggles are just a fan-made concept for now, but they do paint a pretty great picture of what Snapchat’s vision for AR glasses should be in the future – a pair of chic looking frames built with pretty good cameras, depth-sensing and motion-tracking AI, transparent augmented-reality displays, and a nifty spectacle case to charge your Snap Goggles when you’re not wearing them!

Designer: Swift Creatives Studio

Facebook just demonstrated what they claim is the world’s thinnest VR headset

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Looking at this rudimentary prototype, one wouldn’t assume that a device so thin could be Facebook’s new stab at a consumer-grade VR headset. The company only recently announced it would be terminating sales and support of Oculus Go, its affordable VR headset… and that left a pretty obvious void in Oculus’s catalog of products. The creative minds sitting in Facebook’s Reality Labs (FRL), however, have been working on making VR headsets less clunky/bulky, and more like something you’d want to carry around and wear at work or at home.

Demonstrated at this year’s virtual SIGGRAPH conference, Facebook Reality Lab’s latest prototype VR wearable is, to mildly put it, ridiculously thin, measuring at just around 9mm. Designed to look like a pair of wayfarers, these glasses actually hold display units inside them, and Facebook’s research in viewing optics technology has helped them condense the headset from something that feels like a toaster strapped to your face, to a pair of frames that look like a pretty slick pair of shades.

So how is this even possible? How did Facebook manage to shrink a state-of-the-art headset into something that’s 9mm thick? Well, FB’s research blog’s been kind enough to release a GIF that shows exactly how the spectacles create the illusion of distance between the eyes and the display. It’s sort of similar to how binoculars work, in which mirrors are used to make a beam of light take a longer path within a small chamber. FB’s prototype headset, however, doesn’t use mirrors, but rather relies on a holographic lens. You see, a VR headset has three main components – a source of light (e.g., LEDs), a display panel that brightens or dims the light to form an image (e.g., an LCD panel), and a viewing optic that focuses the image far enough away so that the viewer’s eyes can see it (e.g., a plastic lens). LED and LCD panels can easily be compressed into slim modules that are paper-thin, but the trick has always been to make lenses thinner, and to reduce the large gap between the lens and the image. The prototype headset’s revolutionary holographic lens achieves this impossible feat by not just being thin, but by also creating the illusion of distance in a way that feels like the screen, that’s literally right in front of you, is a couple of feet away (there’s a demo GIF below too). This headset, for now, exists only in a prototype stage as the guys at Facebook’s Reality Labs try to work out the kinks in the design, from creating LED/LCD panels that are high-resolution and eye-strain-free, to accommodating other components like chipsets and batteries into the headset’s slim design.

“While it points toward the future development of lightweight, comfortable, and high-performance AR/VR technology, at present our work is purely research. In our technical paper, we identify the current limitations of our proposed display architecture and discuss future areas of research that will make the approach more practical. To our knowledge, our work demonstrates the thinnest VR display demonstrated to date, and we’re excited to see what the future holds”, say the guys at FRL.

Designer: Facebook Reality Labs

This assistive wearable camera reads any text that’s in front of you

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It’s great for people looking to easily read foreign languages, but even better for people with weak eyesight to begin with.

The OrCam MyEye 2 feels a lot like what the Google Glass should have evolved to become. I’m talking about ditching the holographic crystal and focusing on the camera technology, combined with Google Lens’ identification algorithm. Designed to be a small, retrofittable wearable camera that attaches to any pair of spectacles, the MyEye 2 can identify objects in front of it and read any text within its frame.

The MyEye 2 is more assistive tech than consumer tech. It helps people with low visibility to ‘see’ things by actively translating text and identifying objects. Just point at anyone or anything and the MyEye 2 picks up your gesture, analyzing what (or who) you’re pointing at. If you’ve got text in front of you, the MyEye 2 begins reading it out, allowing you to easily read fine print like newspapers, menu cards, and ingredients lists without worrying about straining your eyes. The tech works for humans too, allowing you to point at familiar people and have the wearable identify them for you.

Given that it functions as a visibility aiding device, the MyEye 2’s interface is incredibly intuitive. It works just by pointing at text, objects, and people and can even recognize voice commands… besides, if you’re visually impaired, skip the pointing and just press the button on the device and it analyzes everything within its frame. The MyEye 2 comes with a universal design that easily straps onto any pair of glasses, thanks to a magnetic band. This means it can easily be taken off whenever not in use, and even while worn, the fact that it weighs just 22 grams makes it easy enough to wear every day without worrying about the weight.

Designer: OrCam