The news of the acquisition of Kopin’s Golden-i Infinity smart glasses by RealWear proves right to phone-tethered smart glasses.
At Iristick we made that choice already years ago. This design choice allowed us to leverage the power of a smartphone, create a comfortable and light to wear pair of glasses for the user with maximum processing power and battery life. By using the phone as the processing power station, you can easily integrate the hardware items such as camera, zoom lens (Iristick. Z1 has a 5x optical zoom lens), display and microphones, with the standard applications available on smartphones. It also makes the cost of deployment for the end user lower, since they can upgrade easily to the next gen smartphone, without having to replace the smart glasses, making it a more stable investment.
Selecting the right smartphone (and corresponding operating system) is crucial. A lot of smart glasses pilots do not make it into a project, because IT departments do not want to allow “exotic” devices on the operational network as it presents a clear security threat. Industrial smart glasses will only become mainstream solutions when they offer best of breed (glasses and phones) that seamlessly integrate with a companies’ operational and IT standards.