IF THE TECHNOLOGY CAN BE CRACKED, THE
POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS
that will be needed is augmented reality (AR). That’s the ability to have digital 3D objects appear as though they are part of the real world. We can already do this. If you’ve ever used a camera filter to wear a virtual hat on a video call, you’ve used AR.
Similarly, in recent years, huge advances have been made in spatial audio. This is when sound is processed to give it a sense of place. So that instead of simply coming from the headphones in your ears, it sounds as though it came from a specific place in the room. Some high-end headphones can already do that today—and will be crucial if we are to blur the line between the real and digital worlds. And future glasses will of course need speech recognition. Unlike a phone, it won’t be possible to touch the screen on a pair of glasses, so we’ll need an alternative means of interacting.
Alexa and Siri show that we can already do this.
What’s fun is that, as the tech analyst Benedict Evans observes, while our phones are not dramatically changing, if you squint hard enough you can still see small steps being taken by the big tech firms towards technologies and features that will be directly applicable to smart glasses.
For example, on those boring new iphones it is possible to use your phone’s camera to copy and paste text from real life. If you point your phone at a number on a shop window, you can now just press on it to call the number on your phone. This might seem a bit pointless on a phone—why can’t you just type the number in? But imagine you’re wearing a pair of smart glasses instead, and you can immediately imagine why this would be more convenient.
So if the technology is here, why aren’t we all wearing smart glasses yet? The reason is because there is just one stumbling block left: the screen. So far no one has invented a good way of projecting digital images on glass lenses. Though there have been a few attempts, such as Google Glass, they were disadvantaged by a very limited “field of view”. Basically, while your eyes can see a 270-degree view of the world around you, the best smart glasses screens can only display images at around 30-40 degrees. This means that the virtual images can only appear on a tiny portion of your vision. This is a problem that, behind the scenes, the likes of Apple, Google and Facebook are pouring enormous resources into solving. So while I can’t say exactly when smart glasses will arrive, they could come into focus much sooner than we think.
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