The market research firm Tractica estimates that 12 million units of "smart augmented reality glasses" will ship in the next five years. The company counts everything from Google Glass to Oculus Rift and Magic Leap, so they don't seem to be making much of a distinction based on use case. Nonetheless, Tractica estimates that 114,000 units of AR glasses will ship this year, … [Read more...]
New Android Wear Functions Coming Soon
Google is talking officially about an upcoming update to Android Wear, an update that will include several interesting improvements to the UI. Several of the improvements are designed to trim the number of times that using your watch becomes a two-handed operation. You'll soon be able to move your way through screens by flicking your wrist instead of touching the screen. … [Read more...]
Playstation Flow: Underwater Wearable Gaming Tech
Yes, it's an April Fool's joke. Besides, we do Xbox One around here. https://youtu.be/9bPUaLpNcMY And, you know, it's not the dumbest idea we've heard lately... … [Read more...]
Sony Talks A Little About Their Add-On Glass Prototype
Sony is working on a prototype of a visor that clips onto an existing pair of eyeglasses. The working name for the module is "SmartEyeglasses Attach!" (the exclamation point and InterCap are theirs), and they'll unveil it at CES next month. It weighs 40 grams, and uses a 640x400 pixel OLED display that's light-piped to an optical unit that sits in front of the glasses. In … [Read more...]
That Sony E-Ink Watch Was A Crowdfunded Project
Remember that experiment wearable from Sony that we wrote about a few days ago? Techcrunch has found that the watch was available a few months ago on a Japanese crowdfunding site from a group of Sony employees calling themselves Fashion Entertainments. The underlying story, you'll recall (if you clicked through on the original story) was that Sony is trying to encourage its … [Read more...]
Bloomberg Says Sony Has a Design-Forward Wearable Coming. Maybe. Someday.
There's an interesting article on Bloomberg's site that leads with news about a possibly forthcoming wristband from Sony that uses an e-paper to turn the entire device's surface into a display. The article doesn't go into much depth about the device, but turns out instead to be a fascinating analysis of how Sony is trying to throw off its bureaucracy and become a company … [Read more...]
Android Wear Update Adds Untethered Music and GPS
For the record, Google has unveiled a new revision of Android Wear. This version ties its users closer than ever to the Google ecosystem, giving them direct access to their cloud-based Google Play music libraries, without the need for a smartphone. (You need offline playing, also part of the update, turned on.) Also, the new rev supports GPS on Wear devices, for functions like … [Read more...]
New Sony Wristware Reportedly Coming at IFA
We told you last week that there was going to be a drumbeat of news coming out of IFA this week. Sony is apparently joining the conga line with a refresh of its Smartwatch and a new lower-end Smartband. The Smartwatch 3, according to 9to5Google, is a follow-on to the company's earlier Smartwatches, which have proven popular in Europe but not the United States. The Smartwatch … [Read more...]
Who’s Making How Much Money in the Wearable Band Market
We've been thinking a lot about the recent Canalys report about market share in the wearables business, and we've been trying to tease some actual revenue numbers based in the results they published. This is valuable because these companies are either private and don't publish revenues, or are public and don't break this market down in their financials. Canalys said that … [Read more...]
Fixya Crowdsources Five Smartwatch Reviews
We here have been writing and editing tech product reviews for going on three decades, so we claim some significant expertise about them. But Fixya's showing an interesting approach to the process we haven't seen before: collecting thousands of troubleshooting reports and drawing conclusions about the products. Fixya aggregated about 6,000 user reports about five smart … [Read more...]