To celebrate its 21st anniversary, Dyson (the vacuum cleaner folks) are talking about some of the projects it’s tinkered with over the years but never brought to market. Turns out that one of them was something that looks an awful lot like Google Glass.
We’re talking 2001 technology, so the electronics, storage, and communications aren’t to contemporary standards. But the basic ideas are clearly there — and the Dyson Halo folded, which is more than Glass can do even today. Why not bring it to market? Says Dyson:
“I’m afraid our view was partly that this was too big a departure from screen-based work and secondly that the wearing of a headset mounted on spectacle-type viewing of a display with connecting wires to a phone was somewhat clunky.”
It required a disk drive pack, too many wires, and a wrist=worn device that acted like a cursor. The company worked on it for three years before hanging it up. One wonders if something this primitive would have promoted or slowed wearable tech revolution.