Awesome Stuff: A Voice-Operated Household Assistant

from the ok-computer dept

Ever since Star Trek: The Next Generation, who among us hasn't thought it would be cool to have an omnipresent voice interface with a starship or, failing that, our own house? Sure, PADDs iPhones have Siri now, but it's just not the same. Our focus for this week's Awesome Stuff isn't the first attempt to create a voice-operated computer assistant for the home, and it probably won't be the last, but the Mycroft is certainly worthy of note.

The Good

One of my first Kickstarter purchases was the Ubi, an earlier attempt at this idea by a startup that now appears to have given up on device manufacturing and focused entirely on operating a cloud service. Nevertheless, it was a nice little piece of hardware and fun to play with — but it's always fallen a little short of the smooth, perfect functioning that would be necessary to make it a seamless part of everyday life. Whether or not the Mycroft will hit a higher mark is impossible to know for sure without trying one out in person, but there are a couple aspects that make it notable.

First is the fact that it's built with a commitment to open software and hardware. It's built on a Raspberry Pi (with all the tweakability and extendibility that implies) and Linux, and is completely open source, with a special backer tier on Kickstarter that gets developers early access to the software which they can run on their own Pis before Mycroft is released. As for the AI processing that happens in the cloud, it's all done using various open, public APIs for things like voice recognition and natural language processing, rather than relying on a single proprietary service like most such devices. Second is the price: thanks to all that open software and hardware, the Mycroft on Kickstarter clocks in at only $150 for the fully extendable model and $130 for the more basic version (including global shipping, and with some additional early bird discounts still kicking around too). This is considerably lower than several voice systems with fewer features.

The Bad

Devices like this are very hard to evaluate without trying them out, or at least reading some hands-on reviews — so these pre-production Kickstarter sales are for those who have faith, spare cash, or a really insatiable desire to achieve that Star Trek dream. It's also important to keep in mind that the Mycroft isn't especially useful as a standalone unit: its capabilities come from integration with other smart-home devices and the internet of things — or at least other Mycroft units. For people whose homes are already equipped with smart thermometers, wireless door locks, networked sound systems and the like, a centralized voice control system is a powerful tool, but for everyone else it's just a fun toy/exceptionally fancy alarm clock. "Here I am, brain the size of a planet..."

The Okay-Free

This is an odd detail, but one that stands out if you've used multiple voice-activated devices before: you don't need to say "Okay, Mycroft" to wake the unit up — just its name by itself will do. This is nice, since a lot of devices use the "okay" phrase (I've got "okay Google" for Google Now searches on smartphones, "okay OnePlus" to wake my OnePlus One, and "okay Ubi" for the aforementioned similar device), and while this does make that Radiohead album seem prophetic, these "okays" have a tendency to cross-pollinate and wake up the wrong device. Mycroft, I suppose, is a unique enough sound that the device can listen for it without the need for an additional trigger — though it remains to be seen whether it will be accidentally awoken by episodes of the BBC's Sherlock.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, mycroft, star trek

Awesome Stuff: When Two Colossal Robots Fight, Everybody Wins

from the rock-'em-sock-'em dept

By now, you've probably heard that there's a giant robot fight coming in the near future: a US team has challenged a Japanese team to a brawl, and the challenge was accepted on the condition that it includes hand-to-hand fighting. Clearly America isn't going to back down because of this requirement, but that means Megabots Inc. needs to upgrade its Mk.II bot — and they're turning to the crowd for help.

The Good

Three words: giant robot fight. Picture BattleBots (it's back!) but way, way bigger and with the drivers inside the robots. Do you need more than that? Well, the specifics are pretty cool: Mk.II is already a formidable robot, but designed mostly to look awesome and deliver long-range attacks. The team has an overall $1.5-million plan to do a significant overhaul and get the Mk.II ready to take on the Japanese bot — and they're seeking the first $500,000 on Kickstarter. That'll cover new armor, melee weapons, a higher top speed, and the necessary hydraulics and power systems to keep all that operational. If they can break through the target and hit some stretch goals, things start to get even more interesting: at $750k they'll begin designing and testing modular weapons to find the best armament; at $1-million they'll begin working with the winners of a DARPA challenge to give the currently-top-heavy Mk.II advanced balancing capabilities (like the videos of self-balancing DARPA robots that get creepier every day); at $1.25-milion they'll bring in NASA safety experts to make sure the driver is completely protected (should this maybe be... higher priority?); and at $1.5-million they'll apply the icing to the cake in the form of a Hollywood-grade paint job.

Even if you don't care who wins this fight, you probably want to see it happen.

The Bad

...And if you do care who wins this fight (and are rooting for the US) then you should probably back this project, because at the moment there's plenty of reason to believe that the Mk.II might have bitten off more than it can chew. Its opponent — the Kuratas by Suidobashi Heavy Industry — is an extremely impressive machine. The Mk.II might be a bit heavier-duty, but the Kuratas is far more maneuverable and features some pretty advanced targeting and piloting systems. It's pretty clear why the Japanese team wanted a hand-to-hand combat component: the Kuratas hasn't been seen sporting any particularly heavy firepower (while the US bot, unsurprisingly, has) but it's not hard to picture it taking out the Mk.II up close by trumping it on manoeuvrability and balance — because, like so many robot competitions over the years, there's a good chance this one will end somewhat-disappointingly with one of the bots unceremoniously falling over. $1.5-million worth of upgrades will go a long way towards ensuring this is a fair and intense fight.

The Empowering

Of course, as much fun as it will be to see these robots in action, the real dream for many will be to drive one — and that's absolutely a possibility. Starting at $1000, all the tiers offer the chance to pilot the Mk.II — with higher prices bringing in the chance to try out its guns and fists. At the top tier of $10,000, you get to join the pit crew and get the inside view of the entire match including watching on-site assembly of the bot — and since all five spots were snatched up far more quickly than expected, the team has added another round of five, and three of those have already been claimed.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, japan, robots

Awesome Stuff: 3D Photography For All

from the scan-away dept

One of the oft-touted features of 3D printers, especially in the early days, was the ability to scan an object and reproduce it. But as the printers themselves have become cheaper and more accessible, the focus seems to have shifted to downloadable and shareable designs, with little attention being paid to the scanning devices that help complete the "replicator" vision of our 3D printing future. This week we're looking at Bevel, an low-cost device that brings 3D scanning to any smartphone.

The Good

The most immediately noticeable thing about Bevel is the price. Some personal 3D scanners exist in the range of thousands of dollars, and a growing number in the range of hundreds, but I've never seen one that clocks in at a mere $50 like the Bevel. And this isn't something that produces faux-3D images with some forced depth — it's a proper scanning laser that works in concert with a smartphone's existing camera to build a true 3D model of an object. The resultant models are 3D-printing compatible (though likely not without some care and tweaking, as is generally the case) and quite impressively detailed for such a small, low-cost device. Interestingly, the Bevel is not a USB/Lightning peripheral, but rather uses the headphone/microphone jack — which is great for compatibility, though it does mean it needs to be separately charged since it can't draw power from the phone.

The Bad

The Bevel does appear to be tied down to a proprietary app, though for such a smartphone-specific device requiring presumably quite complex software, that's not a huge shock. I'd love to see more interoperability in smartphone peripherals, and the separation of device drivers from specific apps, but it's hard to lay the blame for that solely at Bevel's feet. More curious and concerning is their insistence on trademarking the term "Genuine 3D" to describe Bevel's photos. While I understand the desire to differentiate Bevel from apps that create a fake 3D photo effect, trying to turn the concept of a proper 3D scan/photo combination into a trademarked brand name seems unnecessary and potentially problematic, given that it's a function and a type of media that is going to become increasingly commonplace.

The Creepy

Bevel's 3D photos are quite impressive. It can capture very complex objects, even people, with a high level of detail. But... the results when it comes to people, while technically appreciable, are creepy as hell. I totally understand the desire to show off the Bevel's capabilities, but using terrifying renderings of their team members as flagship examples is an odd choice. I can see lots of uses for the Bevel, but their marketing material seems to suggest the most popular will be capturing moments with friends, which I frankly doubt unless your friends are already wrinkly zombie creatures.

Filed Under: 3d, awesome stuff

Awesome Stuff: Making Mesh Networks

from the come-together dept

Remember the early days of wireless routers, when every city street-corner was home to a dozen unsecured WiFi connections? That was hardly an ideal (or safe) state of affairs, but it did feel rather nice and neighbourly at times, and there was a certain sadness in watching all the open networks get locked down over the years. Today we're looking at Meta Mesh, a project that aims to help communities recapture the good parts of those glory days in a fair, secure and superior manner by building their own distributed bandwidth-sharing networks with ease.

The Good

Mesh networking is a powerful idea, and one that embodies the spirit of distributed design and open interconnection that underpins the internet. The basic idea is that by uniting a community on a shared network with no central access point, you can share the huge amounts of unused and inefficiently allocated bandwidth that gets paid for and wasted every day. ISPs, after all, are not doing a good job (or any kind of job) at this allocation: power users pay exorbitant fees and are viewed by ISPs as a problem, low-income users have few if any options for affordable service, and the average person pays for far more bandwidth than they ever use. Few cities can or will offer municipal wi-fi, and those that try often do a pretty poor job of it.

A mesh network lets a community fix all that on its own. The average home or business now has a bunch of powerful wireless networking equipment sitting in a corner to serve a handful of computers and devices — but what if those homes and businesses used that equipment to connect to each other, to turn all their little networks into one big one and extend it throughout the city? The possibilities are huge.

If there's one key reason this isn't already happening in most major cities, it's that it isn't necessarily easy to do. That's what Meta Mesh aims to change by offering a complete guide to setting up mesh networks without a lot of technical expertise, and a web store where people can purchase preconfigured equipment. The necessary gear isn't expensive, and hasn't been for a long time — removing the technical barriers to finding and setting up that gear changes mesh networks from complex projects into simple solutions.

The Bad

Bandwidth sharing is a critical function of mesh networks, and might be their "killer app" as it were — but the possibilities actually extend far beyond that, which is something I wish Meta Mesh was discussing more. Think of all the other things a community could do with its own ad-hoc network: local versions of geographically-linked services from Craigslist to Uber to Tinder; neighbourhood cryptocurrencies and other tools built on a local blockchain ledger; peer-to-peer sharing that never touches the wider internet. Imagine the possibilities when these networks are extendable and bridgeable. Mesh networks won't just revolutionize how we connect to the internet — they are poised to become a powerful and vibrant part of the the global information network in their own right.

Meta Mesh is a great first step, but I worry that the pitch's focus on bandwidth-sharing makes this sound exclusively like a charitable endeavour, when in fact it's so much more.

The Obstacles

Of course, there's little doubt that ISPs will react badly to this. The aforementioned shift from mostly open to mostly locked-down home WiFi networks — though ultimately a good thing for security's sake — didn't happen so rapidly because people started learning about security: it happened because ISPs gave up on their short-lived crusade to stop customers using wireless routers entirely, and started supplying pre-secured ones themselves. You can expect them to be just as crafty in attempting to prevent this kind of bandwidth-sharing too: first by enforcing their anti-sharing terms of service, then if that fails by attempting to take control of the mesh networking world and milk it for every penny (destroying its purpose in the process). It will be a frustrating battle, but one that ISPs are no longer in a position to easily win as more and more people are waking up to the fact that broadband service in this part of the world sucks.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, broadband, mesh network

Awesome Stuff: Making GovTrack Even More Awesome

from the how-a-bill-becomes-a-law dept

If you pay any sort of ongoing attention to Congress, you're probably familiar with GovTrack, the extremely useful online resource created by Joshua Tauberer in 2004, containing robust info on the status of all the bills that hit the floors of the House and the Senate. It's a fantastic tool, and today we're looking at a crowdfunding push to make it even better by hiring a full-time researcher to add additional context and analysis to the bills and votes being tracked.

The Good

Until very recently, GovTrack was fully automated and had no staff — which is why one man's pet project has been going strong for over a decade without much if anything in the way of revenue. But Joshua knows there's lots more the site could be doing, and recently hired an intern to start testing out a big new addition to GovTrack: researchers who can closely follow the most important bills and dig into them deeper than the algorithms can, providing commentary and analysis plus readable summaries of legislation, and reporting on the underlying political context. To that end, they've also launched GovTrack Insider as a Medium page, which already features a bunch of posts on various important bills and votes from the last few months.

The Kickstarter goal is to upgrade from an intern to a full-time researcher on a six-month contract — or two as a stretch goal. This could really take the already-useful GovTrack to a whole new level.

The Bad

While I don't by any means think this is a bad idea, there are still a few potential pitfalls. The first is that it's not clear how this one-time fundraising goal can/will translate into something ongoing. A researcher can do a whole lot in six months, but the ongoing flow of bills through Congress requires ongoing attention with no end in sight. Will we be looking at another Kickstarter for the next congressional session? Or is there some plan to secure new revenue streams with the expanded GovTrack? Either way, if this project is as useful to people as it's likely to be, some will surely be happy to keep paying.

The other, perhaps more critical, pitfall is politicization. Once you move from automatically tracking raw data to actually writing up summaries and analyses, it's almost inevitable that you'll have to start taking political/ideological sides from time-to-time, no matter how committed you might be to neutrality or objectivity. It might prove very difficult to expand GovTrack in this way without beginning to be seen as an at-least-slightly partisan publication rather than a wholly neutral tool for anyone to use — though, that doesn't mean it's impossible.

The Rewarding

There are some very interesting rewards available for backers of this project (and the choice to link the dollar amounts for the various tiers to important Congress-related numbers is a neat one). At lower levels, backers can get in on webinars and group chats that explore Congressional issues and provide advice on political advocacy, while the higher tiers offer the ability to get custom summaries and analyses written of bills that you choose.

But perhaps the most attractive (or at least the most fun) options are those that take advantage of the research intern's other skill: art. At various tiers, he'll draw you a custom caricature of any Representative or Senator that you choose. No word on if you get to dictate how flattering or unflattering said caricature is, though.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, congress
Companies: govtrack

Awesome Stuff: A Little Box Of Videos

from the shoot-and-store dept

GoPro cameras were a revolution in the world of video, enabling a level of high-action photography with a low-cost, out-of-the-box solution. In general, there's a growing number of rugged outdoor devices for capturing video, pictures and sound — but there's still a stumbling block for people who venture to the corners of the earth with their cameras in tow. This week, we're looking at the Gnarbox, which could be the final piece of the puzzle for outdoor action photographers.

The Good

What's the one stumbling block I mentioned? Simple: dealing with all your footage. A day out with a GoPro at full resolution generates gigabytes of video, leaving you with two main options, neither of them great. You can carry a bunch of backup memory cards for the camera, or you can add a laptop to your travelling kit — largely negating the ability to just toss a bunch of extremely rugged gear in your bag without fear of damage (or requiring the purchase of a rugged outdoor laptop — something far rarer and more expensive than a camera).

Gnarbox is the new third option: a tiny, heavy-duty device that's halfway to being a full-fledged computer. It has 128gb of internal storage, so you can quickly load it up with the day's footage (by USB or with the built-in SD card reader), but that's just the beginning: it also has its own GPU and CPU, and serves as a WiFi hotspot to create a local network. This means that once you've got the footage loaded up, you can wirelessly connect to the Gnarbox with your smartphone, control it via the app, and actually start editing and sharing videos — even full-resolution 4K ones. Not only does this eliminate the problem of dealing with all your footage and clearing off your camera for the next day's adventure, it also makes it easy to rapidly share the videos you are creating without needing to wait until you reach a computer-equipped home base.

The (Not Actually) Bad

In many of these Awesome Stuff posts, I've bemoaned the fact that otherwise-cool devices are so often limited by the choice to make them exclusively smartphone-controlled. But the Gnarbox is a different case: its entire purpose is to replace more robust computers in situations where they aren't ideal, and to bring a level of video editing capability to your phone that was formerly the exclusive realm of higher-power devices. So, for once, I have no complaints about the fact that it requires the use of an Android or iOS app, since if you're near a desktop or laptop then you don't have any need for it to begin with. That's the right reason to build a smartphone-only device: not because you want to lock people in to your proprietary app or you want to block power-users from getting into the nuts and bolts of your product, but in order to bring a new capability to smartphones that they didn't have before. Editing 128gb of 4k footage certainly qualifies.

The Inexpensive

If any of this has piqued your interest, now is the time to go check out the Gnarbox, because there are some pretty great deals for Kickstarter backers. Even the projected retail price of $250 is attractive for such a device, but the Kickstarter rewards knock 40% off that price and let you order one for only $150, two for only $279, or a big pack of ten for only $100 a pop. But be warned, these are all limited quantities, and not just for the early bird prices but for the device itself — the initial Kickstarter run of 1000 Gnarboxes is already down to less than 200, so there doesn't seem to be much time left.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, gopro, video

Awesome Stuff: Made With Creative Commons

from the no-silver-bullet dept

The last several weeks have focused on tech and gadgets, but this week we're taking a break from that to look at a project I know will interest a lot of folks here at Techdirt. Instead of running down "The Good" and "The Bad", let's just explore why the new crowdfunded book Made With Creative Commons could be a great addition to the conversation about culture in the digital age.

For years, we've repeatedly brought up the fact that there's no silver bullet business model for creators in the digital age, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to make money. We've also been pointing out countless creator success stories, and virtually all of them are based on some highly original or custom-tailored approach to monetizing work. Many of those stories have been met with complaints that they aren't replicable, but that's exactly the point: without a silver bullet, every creator needs to figure out what business model works for them, not just copy what has (or hasn't) worked for others.

The folks behind Made With Creative Commons are acutely aware of this idea. The book aims to catalogue a huge list of artists and creators who are successfully making a living online with their creativity while keeping their work open and shareable, and take a closer look at exactly how they are doing it. This can serve two purposes: a source of business inspiration and ideas for other creators, and a resource for open culture supporters in the ongoing debate about copyright and control. In that latter sense, it's like a more thorough version of the link-laden paragraphs you've seen us deploy here on Techdirt from time to time, whenever a successful creator is called a 'fluke':

Of course, these days there are an awful lot of flukes. Like this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one. And that's just a few that I remembered and could easily look up, rather than any sort of representative sample. But they're all flukes.

Backers of the project also get to cast votes for creators who they think should be included, and then of course the final product will itself be released under a Creative Commons license. But with less four weeks to go, the project still has a considerable amount of funds to raise in order to hit its goal — so if you'd like to see a book like this in production, or have strong opinions about who deserves to be featured inside, head on over to the project page and show your support.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, creative commons

Awesome Stuff: A Mesh Network For Your Things

from the never-forget dept

Plenty of people have tried to market various devices for keeping track of your keys or never losing your wallet, but they've tended towards the cumbersome and gimmicky, and have always been pretty limited in their function. This week, we're taking a look at a much cooler approach to the same problem: little computers called Trakkies that attach to your things and link them all up in a mesh network.

The Good

Trakkies are a great example of innovation at work. The problem — people losing their keys, forgetting their bags, etc. — has an obvious solution in a world of wireless technology, but implementing that solution in a functional and stylish way that makes people say "wow, I want that" is another challenge altogether. Trakkies go beyond a simple proximity or location system, and instead make all your stuff smart. The little node tags come in two sizes, each with a bunch of sensors and a big configurable button; they locate each other and form a mesh network with Bluetooth and NFC connectivity, and begin learning what you bring with you and when. Your wallet can warn you if you're leaving the house without your keys, and vice versa — or you can tap the button on any one tag to find out if all the others are with you. The associated mobile app is optional (a beautiful thing) and brings your phone into the mesh network without the need for an an attached node tag, plus provides additional tools like looking up the last known location of all your tags on a map.

The network can communicate with lots of other smart devices and can be hooked into IFTTT for programmable behaviours based on a wide variety of factors. And the buttons on each node can be set up with context-sensitive functions — so the button on your coat could be set to tell you if your phone isn't with you, but serve as a music skip control if it is; it could check for your wallet and keys when you're getting off the bus, but turn on and off your smart lightbulbs when you're at home. Trakkies take a big leap beyond solving a simple problem, and actually spark excitement about the new things they could enable.

The Bad

Truthfully, at this stage, I don't have much bad to say about this project. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. The price isn't cheap, but it isn't prohibitive either, and the designers have made what I'd consider all the right choices. The "internet of things" has been looming on the horizon for some time now, and a device like this could represent a meaningful step in that direction.

The Background

There's an interesting bit of backstory to the Trakkies on the Kickstarter page: the whole thing actually started as a software pursuit. The original team was a research company at European Space Agency BIC, and was focused entirely on the data science and machine learning aspects of the project. The switch to a focus on hardware only came when the team realized that nobody was making hardware capable of doing what they wanted their software to do. That's the path innovation often takes, and beautifully illustrative of the fact that the simplest problems — people sometimes forget their keys — can yield the most interesting and groundbreaking solutions.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, mesh network, smart things

Awesome Stuff: Supplying The R For VR

from the look-all-around dept

A few weeks ago, we featured the Gloveone and talked about the growing market for supplemental virtual reality devices. We also talked about the coming VR future on this week's podcast episode. But there's another half of the VR world we haven't talked a lot about: the capture and creation of VR environments. This week, we're looking at the Sphericam 2, a 360-degree 4k camera.

The Good

As VR devices like the Oculus Rift become more popular, there's going to be a huge thirst for content — and in this everyone-is-a-creator world, a huge thirst for content-making tools, too. Though much of the excitement has been around video games and from-scratch environments, there are also plenty of compelling things to be done with material captured the real world. For that, you need an elaborate multi-camera setup — or a device like the Sphericam. It's tiny (about the size of a tennis ball), rugged and full-featured, and requires no special knowledge to capture 360-degree footage which can then be converted to a navigable VR environment. It's basically a GoPro combined with a Google Street View car, and that's pretty cool. For the videophile, it has solid specs: 60fps raw video at 4096x2048 resolution, on six cameras with no blind spots.

The Bad

There's really only one major drawback here, and that's the price. At $1500 plus shipping, it's not something that's going to find its way into everyone's pocket overnight. That's not to say the price is unfair — given the amount of technology packed into the device, it seems at least reasonable, but for the time being it remains an obstacle. Still, just like the VR devices themselves, it's likely that things like the Sphericam will only get more and more accessible as time goes on.

The User Generated

This is the part that's really exciting and interesting about devices like this. Today, it's simply no longer enough to release a new means of consuming content to the world — it needs to come with ways of creating that content. The world of virtual reality will have no multi-decade gap between early "professional only" days and later "everyone's in on it" days, like photography or film or recorded music — the two will arrive almost simultaneously, with content coming from a huge spectrum from amateur to professional and everything in between. Devices like the Sphericam are paving the way for this, demonstrating that even something cutting-edge like virtual reality can and will be adopted by creators of all classes. It's going to be an interesting future in more ways than one.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, cameras, video, virtual reality

Awesome Stuff: Not Quite Google Glass

from the heads-up dept

The failure of Google Glass was an interesting thing. Somewhat-overblown privacy issues aside, the device may have just been ahead of its time, or ahead of the technology powering it — or it might have simply been way too expensive. Whatever the case, wearable computers and head-mounted displays aren't dead, and in fact we'll probably be seeing a lot of them in the future. Today, we look at one such offering: Vufine, a wearable display that does less than Google Glass, which might be its biggest strength.

The Good

As the video reveals, the creator of the Vufine has tried just about every wearable display product around, and concluded that they are "unfocused, overpriced, impractical and overcomplicated." That's a pretty solid diagnosis, and the Vufine attempts to solve it. Firstly, it's just a wearable display, not a full computer like Google Glass: it clips onto your glasses or sunglasses, connects to any device with an HD video output, and then projects a small HUD-like display box in your field of vision. This enables lots of integrations, with two immediately obvious ones: hook it to a smartphone for heads-up maps and communication and media, or hook it to a GoPro camera to serve as a viewfinder when shooting your own action footage. Turn the camera around, and it can serve as a rear-view mirror.

By limiting the device to this single, simple, useful function, they skirt around all sorts of issues that are raised by more robust products like Google Glass, including the aforementioned privacy freakouts about head-mounted cameras and microphones. The most immediately noticeable difference is the price: the Vufine aims to retail for only $150, an order of magnitude less than Glass.

The Bad

Of course, simplifying the device also means giving up a lot of functionality. Things like voice control, gesture control, and streaming video from one person to another won't be possible unless the Vufine is hooked up to hardware and software that provides those abilities. This is less a "revolutionary new device" and more an innovative display for existing devices — not that there's anything wrong with that, but it may not generate the hype of something like Glass (though at the same time, probably won't generate the ire, either). And there's one feature that will likely irritate some, especially those who pursue wirelessness in all things: the Vufine attaches to your smartphone, camera or other device via a Micro HDMI cable. There are surely a lot of engineering and performance advantages to going the wired route, but the sight of a cable hanging from your face and disappearing into your pocket might be enough to put some people off the device altogether.

The Quantifiable

We've already looked at one of the Vufine's very attractive numbers — the price. Now let's consider a few others. Display-wise, it uses a 4x3mm micro-display that appears as a 4" display positioned 11" from your eye, at a resolution of 960x540 (a higher definition than Glass). It also weighs only 22 grams — about half of Glass and a quarter of the Recon Jet glasses. There's one slightly less attractive number though: the battery life, which clocks in at 90 minutes (compare that to 4 hours for the Jet, and a full day for Glass, though the latter can be drastically shortened depending on what features you are using). It can be attached to a USB charging pack for additional lifespan, but running a second cable from the Vufine to a pack somewhere on your person could be pretty cumbersome.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, hud, wearable display