Gadgetory

hi everyone this is Rafe Needleman in San Francisco with reporters roundtable google says we soon may have augmented reality Google glasses it is the coolest tech demo we've seen this year google has announced that it is working on project glass an effort to create a glasses based heads-up display for the real world with the Google glasses you'll be able to look out a window and get a weather report overlaid on your field of view look at a product to get information about it look at a bus stop and see when the next bus is arriving share photos and maybe even look at a face and get the name that goes with it who wouldn't love that Google glasses can be seen as a competitor to Apple Siri the personal assistant on your smartphone that is supposed to help you live your day-to-day life of course parodies for the demo of google glasses followed quickly after the official google video they highlighted the annoyance factor of having content especially ads pop up in your field of view and the potential dangers from walking or playing the ukulele while distracted when will you be stumbling down the street behind a sea of Google content Google glasses may be available this year ok so our guests to talk about this really interesting in sci fi development our first our writer Martin Lamonica who has been covering this development for us over at cnet news Martin thanks for joining us sure also the CEO of recon instruments dan eisenhardt this is a company that is now making actual augmented reality glasses or I wear for skiers dan thanks for joining us today thanks for having me today of course Google wouldn't join us for the show this is just like there when they announced their driverless cars they made a big splash the news leaked out and then they wouldn't talk to anybody for a while about it to say they're doing the same thing with all the stuff that comes out of the lab Martin I want to start with you tell us specifically what did Google actually announced with this is called Project Glass right right so it's called Project Glass it's from this slab which you reference called Google X labs and all they did was a disclosed that they were working on these odd augmented reality glasses I'm not sure they actually use that term but they said they were working on this project this new type of glassware that we that's essentially a it sort of these wraparound glasses with a small screen above the right eye and you can operate this as you would operate sort of a smartphone except it's voice-activated and in this video that they showed with the announcement there was this guy this kind of cool guy from New York moving around town and getting going through his day and always will notifications come up in that screen and you know it's like magic he he has the information when he needs it he can find things in the book story there's a little notification that the subway is down etc so that's what they announced that they're working on this and that they want some feedback on what people would like what people think about it Oh feedback we can give them that hey so Dan you've been doing this you've been doing augmented reality products tell us a little bit about your product first yeah we develop and sell modular heads-up display systems that snap fit into fashion eyewear from the leading players like scott and smith optics and UX our products are very compact their wireless they're not obtrusive and so they're very highly suitable for everyday use we've tied with the snow sports segment first nine percent of users there already wear goggles so in terms of user adoption that was an easier step for us but we we've got our focus on a lot of other applications as well that will roll out in the near future also outside sports so your goggles it looks like they take the location altitude speed information GPS and project it not in fact over the users field of view but in a corner below where the goggles give them them coverage what have you learned about this product in terms of what users can process and what they want in your particular current market which is snow sports for us the most important thing is safety so we cater to consumers who are in constant motion and never depend on a non-obtrusive a dependable display they can use for glanceable biometrics and GPS information like heart rate speed and distance but also practical things like navigation smart phone connectivity and tracking down friends locations so what we've discovered is that people want to want the situational awareness they don't want obtrusive they want something that when they want to look at it it's an active choice and that's that's I think we've successfully delivered on that so what's your take on the Google announcement here we Google is doing a lot of good for the heads up display industry I think with their recent PR campaign i'll call it that people starting to learn and starting to dream up difference in areas for commercial for the mass market applications i think people deep down know that this is not realistic as it looks today I think it's close but it's probably 2-3 years out but against people think what was to come and we're very thankful for that I mean as you as people know our platform is based on Android it's an open source model so we like to appear in Canada so Martin you've been Martin by the way covers all the cool stuff he covers he's on the robots beat here so he's got the best the best coverage areas well what do you think of this technology our people ready for it and is the technology ready for us I said well judging from the reaction i think people particularly tech geeks our beloved cnet readers would be all over this and it seems like I mean it really was the coolest hard hardware demo but the cool is demo for a long time certainly this year so I think there's definitely a long lot of tech tech appeal you know sort of as a fashion statement I mean Sergey Brin was seen wearing them the next day which was kind of funny in terms of how ready it is um I think it's what they showed was a stretch you know to do all that so seamlessly would be very would be difficult it's not to say it's beyond the beyond capabilities of what's what's available now but it would take some work to to make it so smooth I mean just just for example the voice recognition software has to have to work seamlessly and I think you know I think there's a lot of organ ama questions to like you know how do you operate this you know those what does the screen how do you focus on the screen how do you control this in the first place that wasn't very clear from the video now Sergei was seen wearing what may for all we know have been a wood and plastic casing for a possible google goggles when because he didn't let any but he didn't let scoble put him on his head that's right and I wouldn't let Scoble wear anything that I was touching either but that's different sort was he wearing the real thing or was he just showing what the Nerds of the future will be looking like um honestly I don't know I mean I suspect he was playing with some sort of early prototype I mean they're testing them I mean this is this these are real things it's not complete vaporware but as to how ready it is you have the hardware or the services behind it I think that's I think that's that's a ways off and honestly we you know it's really speculation master that's how ready it is let's talk a little bit about the technology that's required to make augmented reality in your eyeballs work there's a lot of things as there is with any kind of ubiquitous technology there's a lot of pieces that have to come together there's the optical the the input method the data and all that and let's start with the optical now Dan just to educate people hear what you've got one of the interesting problems with with products like yours is you've got a product which is inches from your eyeball and yet the user is focusing on things that are hundreds of feet away optically infinity how do you square that without having the user having to shift focus all the time and how will Google do this so we're using a sort of a high contrast ocular display technology which is basically a micro LCD and then we have an acrylic display technologies like a prison technology in front of it which magnifies the image and then augments it out in front of you so so we've got the optics scientists working here our labs designing that and and we thought that was the best application for for for our users and but no we have a platform a system that is basically agnostic to the display type so once we feel the transparent displays I'm mature enough and here you know I think you trust in a few good things there there's still a lot as a long way to go in terms of power consumption in terms of brightness for outdoor use and then the safety aspect that needs to be overcome and I mean heads-up displays and in-situ displays and by no means new technology it's been around for four decades yeah if your f-18 fighter pilot exactly exactly but there you've got a big helmet and you've got more space you you're connected with a cord to a power source if you want something that's compact that's not obtrusive that that's fashion fashionable and that can last you for more than 30 minutes and it doesn't cost you five thousand dollars it's very very difficult to imagine that that can be done today there's a lot of companies that have been working on this for four decades I do think it's coming but I do think that there's just a bunch of challenges that need to be overcome now I did a little i was looking at these pictures of Sergei's had thing which he had a what looked like a very small monocle below that his field of vision or in the corner of his field of vision that appeared to be a mirror that was reflecting something that was coming out of a projector at around his eyebrow which led me to think that what was happening with that particular product was that it was projecting something into his eye rather than being a see-through type technology and in order to do what the what the video showed where the images were actually in front of your face not just in a little corner like recon that's a fairly different technology Martin do you know anything about that type of kind of retinal projection type of stuff is that what we were looking at here that's a good question you know Dane probably could might be able to comment on that but I think I think you hit the nail on the head and that's one of the big challenges you know is like i said earlier controlling it but also having that immersive thing so that's not so that it doesn't so you can continue doing what you're doing say if you're walking down the street for instance being able to shift focus and still get useful information um but I can't really comment on the head I can comment on that I don't think it's a retinal display technology and the reason why i don't think it's retinal display technologies because the iBox is very very small which means only a slight one millimeter movement let's say off the frame where the hazardous place it's and you're completely out of asian you can't see anything so it's very very sensitive to movement and I think if you're out and about it's not going to be practical because of that technology so i don't think i actually think what's been shown there is a variant of what we have with just their the optics lens exposed so it looks like it's see-through okay that's that's my theory so dandy you have only your little gizmos there I mean we've seen the demo but we haven't seen the whole the whole Megillah here where do you have one there what's this AR yeah yeah I do have one with me and this is this is basically how it looks it's specifically designed to fit into ski goggles I've got a goggle here with me as well in case you don't know how that looks like this is one of our partners this is UX so it looks pretty much like standard pair of goggles but it actually has a cavity built into it on each side on the right and left side where which means you can take our heads up display and basically snap fit it into the Gulf that's so that's how it works now and what how do you what'd he do for input I mean how does the user control this thing today I mean they've got these big heavy ski gloves on do they like jabbed or eyeball with their ski pole I mean how do you tell this thing to do stuff yeah for this year we've got a remote control which is Bluetooth Low Energy so it's got 23 years their lifetime on it and it's blood friendly big buttons here select buttons and directional buttons and we've got a scrap so you can put it on your wrist or on your goggle strap but with our technology we can do gesture controls voice commands all kinds of things imaginable we just started out with with this basic application which comes with the goggles okay now Martin I want to talk about how Google gets the information that it will then magically display in front of your eye of course they have google can get location information orientation which way you're pointing we hope it knows what time it is and those who your friends are what information is necessary to overlay check in it the mud truck or this book is a three dollars less on Amazon or Google than the one you're looking at do they need image recognition or can this be done just with what the smartphone already has um I think for the most part it could it can be done with what a smartphone has assuming this voice recognition but you're right it implies a lot going on behind the scenes and I think you know so you know so I talked in our official intelligent software expert about this story to get an idea of you know what's involved in this sort of thing and he said you know for this to really make sense for anyone to actually want to use this you'd have to do a lot of data analysis and filtering in the back end I mean you could walk up to a store and see 50 ads and see all kinds of information that you don't that isn't relevant to to what you want at that moment and I that would will be the trick is to is to highly personalized relevant information that will actually help people rather than you know confuse them are bogging down so we've got to talk about safety and distraction and all the parodies and some of them are just hilarious involve people bumping into poles falling down stairs or getting so many pop-up advertisements that they can't see the real world in front of them dan you've worked on the safety issue here how much in new information can a human process when they are doing the job of navigating their body through the real world what what else can they deal with well you know you can sort of compare this to when the smartphones came out and suddenly we're all glancing down at the smartphone every sort of ten minutes and some are even texting while they're driving their car so which is not recommended so we can definitely get used to a lot of things we can we can train the eye to to look at the the most relevant information there in just a brief a split second but there are limitations so and when you talk about safety you know your own health is at risk here and then and also others so I think we do as the display and manufacturers have a responsibility towards the consumers to not to put anything out there that could be a liability so is the way this works from a business perspective that I mean obviously people will buy these things but it are we are we gonna see ads popping up in front of us minority report style as we're walking down the street all right have you guys take this one well I could jump in and and just remind people that's how google makes funny right i mean they make all kinds of cool services which our ad-supported so you would think that that would be the business model here on the other hand you know there's a question as to what actually works for the user it could really be poorly done as all these blooper videos are all these kind of party videos showed I think if there is advertising it has to be really really judiciously time and not too annoying yeah let's hope let's hope dan go ahead yeah I totally agree with that I think it has to be opt-in it has to be value adding to your particular situation but I do think it's possible to engineer that okay are you do get like little hot toddy advertisements when you're out on the slopes on your product not yet but who knows would make them all right so now if if a listener or viewer of the show wants to experiment with this very cool technology they can of course be a skier or snowboarder and by the recon instruments products how much does it cost to get set up to get this kind of augmented reality for your products then we've got the two versions at 299 and 399 for the module and then there's a wide variety of goggles that you can choose from at different price points ranging from sort of hundred to two hundred dollars all right now for the different partner brands for the full boat version for the four hundred the three hundred ninety nine dollar version of the recon instruments thing what information do I get when I'm on the slopes you get well a lot of information all the standard GPS and from the navigation so all the resort maps in the world are already pre-loaded in there you get body tracking connection to your smartphone so you get text messages and caller ID and playlists heads up and and jump airtime is another app that we we have so that this guy is really the limit here and then obviously with the smart phone connectivity you get access to all those apps as well because we have an open SDK so the community the communities can just develop an app for our system if it isn't already there that sounds so cool i have just I just editorial comment that's cool now Martin when are we going to get this stuff from google for the rest of our lives row for walking around what's google telling us Google's not saying people are speculating this and that I mean they I guess what's significant is that they thought it was advanced enough that they shared what they're actually doing so does Google do that you know year before the release products two years I mean it's it's kind of hard to say but I think I think I think what we'll probably see is a product and a certain set of services now obviously voice is going to be really important to this so you know that's got to be cooked and it's kind of like apples doing with Syria does a couple things and it does it well and I think it's google smart about it they'll they'll take a similar approach so instead of having everything that that guy did in the video maybe it'll be a few maybe look a couple location services or I'm not really sure but my suspicion is that belt now it'll take a while for this stuff to actually develop what else is going on in the labs that we know about over in Google skunk works like it that was one of the interesting things that came out of this this little news cycle is that Google fessed up to Google Labs Google X labs which until now has been secretive and they haven't as far as though they haven't even acknowledged it exists but they they have it's far off stuff so one of the products you mentioned earlier is the driverless car which google has actually been doing for several years and making real progress on and a few other things that have that have are you know so rumored our web of things where you know devices in your home we're all connected to the internet and could be controlled remotely that sort of thing one of the guys who worked on the driver's car and worked on on this project glass is an expert in robotics and machine learning and artificial intelligence so um you know those some of the hints as to what they're working on just kind of more like you know the cyborg you know and giving up the Machine off in the sky artificial intelligence doing more and more things and I think this whole Internet of Things business interest Google as well Martin we're counting on you to tell us when the Google BOTS are going to be marching down our streets like an automation so keep on the on the keep on it there oh do my best thanks for your time dan is CEO of recon instruments hey has google approached you about this technology by any chance uh I don't have any comments there okay I didn't think it would I had to ask dan thanks so much for your time dan eisenhardt again is the CEO of recon instruments you can buy this augmented reality stuff right now if you are a winter sports fan Marta Monica is a writer for us over at cnet news gentlemen thank you very much for your time we'll see you soon