Gadgetory

a lot of tech companies are working on AR glasses right now and in the early days it kind of feels like everyone's trying to justify why air glasses should be a thing for some companies that may mean making sports goggles and for others it may mean making air glasses for entertainment purposes for Toshiba it means basically putting a PC on your face these are two Sheba's new dinah edge AR smart glasses they start shipping today and they start at $1,900 Toshiba is aiming these at enterprise customers think people who work out in the field and might need remote assistance but their hands are tied up so it might not be easy to just use their phone so this is the display arm of the AR headset there's a display that I'm looking at right now in my right eye there's also a camera built-in and there's a microphone for voice control but really the majority of everything that's happening is happening on this this is Toshiba Dyna Edge mini mobile PC it's running on an Intel Core M 5 processor it's running Windows 10 that's 16 gigabytes of RAM 512 gigabytes of internal storage it's basically an entire computer packed into this little thing and this is running all the applications that I'm seeing in my eyes so this is not the computer here some AR headsets that we've seen have been full-fledged face computers this is really a display set the glasses also have a swipe panel on the side and you can eventually use your voice to control them but that wasn't working yet when I tried them I should also mention that even though they're called AR smart glasses this isn't really a are like the kind you've seen lately it's just a flat display resting in front of your eye and Toshiba says that's because the kind of apps they envision people using with these whether it's referencing a document or a PDF or making a quick Skype call doesn't really need volumetric AR so in this case I'm actually going to make a phone call to somebody who is in this case across the room but imagine it's a remote worker I'm gonna go into an application it's called call the operator this is custom Toshiba software built on top of Skype so basically it's using Skype over Wi-Fi and I'm gonna select that application using the computer I'm gonna go down right now I'm scrolling through a list of names I'm fine Philip and I'm giving him a call hi Lauren hey Philip how's it going it's going okay so listen I'm having some trouble out of the field here and I wanted to to get a second opinion on this thing that I'm working on what are you seeing right now yeah I can see the camera and I can see the guys behind it okay hi Felicia hey Tyler they're not both guys but that's okay with the use case for this beyond just you know troubleshooting average video remotely use cases you can show me what you're seeing and I can help you and try to fix it as quickly as possible so when I first put these on they weren't super comfortable to me and that may be because the display was on my right eye and I'm left eye dominant but even after I switched to the left eye it still didn't feel great to me other people the verge tried it on they were a little more comfortable for them one of the good things is that you can adjust the arm that the display is on so you can sort of just twist it or position it in a way that makes sense for you you can also easily slide the arm into non-glass form factors like a safety helmet so you would just be wearing the helmet the arm would slide in front of you and then you'd have the display and also that kind of stable fitting thing made the display feel a little bit more comfortable but there is just a learning curve when you first put them on I mean you're not supposed to look directly at the display the whole time you're wearing them you're supposed to focus on what you're doing in the real world and then when you need it the glanced up to the display so you can refer to it in this way it's not too dissimilar from some very early iterations of air glasses that we've seen like Google glass and it's different from hololens because hololens really just kind of covers your whole face and even though it's a AR or mixed reality makes you feel enveloped in the world around you this doesn't really have that effect so to call these AR glasses feels like a little bit of a misnomer and the pair I saw wasn't totally production-ready but like I said these are still new and Toshiba plans to run tests with its early customers to improve the glasses and who knows maybe in the mean time more people will actually grow to love computers on their faces I'm seeing I'm not seeing you how's that happening you're not supposed to see me I'm only supposed to see what you're seeing so you can concentrate on your job okay so lots of it okay