The Future In Focus

James O’malley explains why smart glasses might be the next big thing

This is awkward for someone who writes about technology to admit but— whisper it—smartphones are getting a little boring. Take the newest iphones, which were released last September, for example. They were a little faster and had slightly better cameras, but they were basically indistinguishable from the iphones already in our pockets.

This is why some people in the tech industry are itching for something new and are asking “What’s next?”. What will be the next revolutionary invention, which will transform our lives just as fundamentally as the smartphone or the personal computer? At the moment, a lot of clever people are betting that it will be smart glasses. The idea is pretty simple. Imagine if instead of having to pick up your phone and look at the screen like a caveman, all of the digital information you need instead simply appears floating right in front of you, in your glasses. Think

128 something like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator vision, but hopefully slightly less deadly.

If the technology can be cracked, the possibilities are endless. Imagine having satellite navigation directions appear right there on the road in front of you. Or having your glasses guide you to the right shelf in the supermarket. Or imagine being able to discreetly watch Youtube during a particularly boring meeting.

Smart glasses could be big in industry too. They could display detailed instructions to engineers, so they can fix things more quickly. Or a doctor performing surgery could beam live footage of exactly what they are seeing to a specialist consultant on the other side of the world, and be guided in real time by an expert.

This sounds like science fiction.

But the reason smart glasses have captured the tech industry’s imagination is because, amazingly, most of the technologies needed to invent them already exist—and they can already be found in our phones. For example, one crucial technology