14 DAY TRIAL // After smart fabrics, now we have smart sunglasses. These devices can display an athlete's performance and heart rate data in their peripheral vision and are a German-British product.
The sunglasses, called "Informance", also visualize a stopwatch and heart rate at one edge. The components required to accomplish this come with only 7 extra-grams to the glasses' normal weight, significantly less than previous head-up displays, heavy devices like those encountered in a fighter pilot's helmet.
The longest side of the prism is fixed towards the runner's eye, while the shortest side looks outwards on the left side. A mini LED display, fueled by a polymer battery inserted into the glasses' left arm provides an image into the prism, which before being reflected twice inside the prism goes to the wearer's eye. "Most head-mounted, or "head-up" displays are made for the defense industry," said Mike Hazel, an optics engineer at Cambridge Consultants, one of the two firms which developed the technology.
Head mounted displays normally project an image from the end of a component located in front of the eye. "If wearable computing is going to be popular you need to provide some information, but not a lot, our goal was to produce something very light that could be styled like a normal spectacle.", said Hazel.
The new model gets data through a wireless connection to a digital watch and heart-rate monitor.
"The display takes up just 12% of the left eye's field of view, making it barely noticeable when looking straight ahead. The brain also compensates for the overlay by emphasizing the right eye view, so it is even less obtrusive in practice.
Furthermore, it can run for 12 hours without recharging," Hazel said. "The display is 160 by 120 pixels and could display even more information. Showing directions and distances transmitted by a GPS unit is one possibility we are interested in. Rodenstock plans to turn Informance into a commercial product by 2009. It should cost between 700 and 1000 euros," said Dietmar Uttenweiler, head of research at German lens manufacturer Rodenstock, the other developer of the new sunglasses.
