Google Has Competition for Internet Eyeglasses

Story first appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

Google Inc. generated a heavy dose of nerdy buzz for its “Project Glass” eyeglasses earlier this month, but the Web search giant may find an unlikely Japanese competitor eyeing the same prize.

Japan’s telecommunications monolith Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. developed a prototype pair of glasses running its “SightFinder” technology earlier this year. It taps into the power of cloud computing, or computers running over the Internet, to help blind people walk the streets safely or prevent the elderly from getting into accidents that they don’t see coming.

While a staid, former government-owned monopoly like NTT can’t match the Silicon Valley cache of Google, both pairs of glasses try to integrate the Internet with glasses. Google’s “Project Glass” eyewear allows the bespectacled to receive messages from friends, check online schedules, and map out directions through the glasses.

By contrast, NTT’s SightFinder sends streaming images from a camera to one of NTT’s data centers to recognize and identify street signs or potential obstacles. In real time, NTT’s computers analyze the images and provide warnings – street construction causing a detour or a cone in front of a pothole – via an Internet-connected device like a smartphone to help the visually impaired to  move freely.

While NTT says the technology is not limited to glasses, it may make the most sense there to track what people are looking at. Other possibilities under consideration include putting the SightFinder in wearable objects such as neck straps. NTT’s glasses, like Google’s, will also be able to provide directions, a feature that the company thinks foreign travelers will find useful.

In a Japanese video NTT posted on Facebook, it showed other potential scenarios for the technology including warning the elderly about oncoming cars.

NTT said it hopes to launch SightFinder this year, but price and timing is still undetermined. The company is in talks with potential commercial partners including local governments, but nothing has been finalized yet.


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Oakley Developing Tech Glasses Too

Story first appeared in the Bloomberg Business Week

Oakley Inc. is developing technology that can project information directly onto lenses, putting the sunglass maker into potential competition with Google Inc.

The technology would let Oakley, a division of Italy’s Luxottica Group, make hardware that’s comparable with Google’s Project Glass, an experimental effort to build smartphone features into eyewear.

Companies are stepping up efforts to build a wider range of electronics -- including articles of clothing -- that can connect wirelessly to the Internet. The market for so-called connected devices, a broad category that includes smartphones, tablets and PCs, may surge to 1.84 billion units in 2016, more than double the figure for last year, according to research firm IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Oakley has been working on such technology since 1997. Ultimately, everything happens through your eyes, and the closer it can be brought to your eyes, the quicker the consumer is going to adopt the platform.

Oakley would initially target athletes with products based on the so-called heads-up technology. Oakley could develop a similar product for the U.S. military through Eye Safety Systems, a subsidiary that specializes in eyewear for military and government agencies.

Obviously, you can think of many applications in the competitive field of sports. That’s the halo point of where we would begin, but certainly you can transcend that into a variety of other applications.

‘Barrier to Success’

Early versions of the product would not be cheap. The product should be able to function on its own, while also working with a smartphone wirelessly using Bluetooth. The device might be controlled with voice commands, similar to Apple Inc.’s Siri software.

There’s a lot of interesting optical issues that come up when you’re trying to create a positive experience when interacting with these devices. So the technology barrier to success is significant.

Oakley released sunglasses in 2004 that featured an MP3 music player built in. While the Thump product line was not a big hit, it is profitable. The latest version, the Thump Pro, costs $129 for a half-gigabyte of storage. That means it holds one-fourth the songs as the smallest iPod, yet costs more than twice as much.

Oakley has been working on technology related to heads-up displays for about 15 years, and has 600 patents, many of which apply to optical specifications. The company would consider licensing the patents.

The CEO declined to comment on whether Oakley would release its own so-called smart glasses, but he said the market for such a device is ripe. He said Oakley would have an edge over more tech-savvy competitors because the company is able to create stylish accessories.


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