And I seriously doubt some of the smaller players (Xander, Vuzix, Xiao, etc.) will be able to compete with the likes of Meta and Samsung. Of course Apple will be entering the picture in three years or so, probably with Google but that’s a long way off.
Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, which are essentially “Meta glasses with a display,” are being developed to include features that can transcribe speech to text in real-time, making them potentially useful for individuals with hearing impairments; this functionality is achieved through advanced AI capabilities that translate spoken words into visible captions on the glasses display.
Serious question - Is there a huge market clamoring for this? Or is it really a “just because we can” novelty?
I ask this because on the one hand, something like that could be helpful for me…in some situations, but I can’t see it being anything like a panacea.
I am struggling with two main things. The first is that hearing can be mostly passive, but reading is active. It requires intent, focus, attention. I feel like if I were in a conversation with someone, focusing on the inside surface of the lenses of my glasses would be somewhat disconcerting to the person I am speaking with.
Which brings me to my second thing - how are you going to prevent people from wearing them while driving their car? Can you safely pilot a motor vehicle down the roadway while staring at text 1" away from your eyeballs?
I fully realize that I may be missing something obvious, but on the surface…
You bring up good points and I have a few answers.
You said - I feel like if I were in a conversation with someone, focusing on the inside surface of the lenses of my glasses would be somewhat disconcerting to the person I am speaking with.
Well if you’re looking at the person speaking and reading text captioning at the same time I seriously doubt anyone is going to notice irregular eye movement. Of course you can read text captioning off your cell phone, which is really disconcerting to the person speaking.
When your driving you won’t be wearing your AR glasses with speech to text due to need for full vision out of both glass lenses. Or possibly you just turn off speech to text display while behind the wheel. But alas people still text on their cell phone while driving, so there will be drivers who have glasses text display on while driving. Risky
I think the bigger questions are time delay, any limits on display verbaige, glare from sun or outside day use, etc. But what’s very encouraging is AR glasses in general seem to be in the sweet spot for general pricing, say $400 to $1500. And over time competitive pricing should come down.