Today, Intel showed off a pretty awesome-looking pair of smart glasses that look better than pretty much anything we’ve seen to date.
It’s unclear what the development future will be for the glasses as the company is reportedly exploring a partial sale of the division and it has already shut down work on its “merged reality” headset program. While there are a lot of questions up-in-the-air, there are also a lot of other startups working on similar solutions that do things differently than the HoloLens or Meta or Magic Leap, focusing on smart glasses that do a few useful things. All of these startups are looking to get products out in the near-term, largely for the sake or pre-empting Apple’s rumored foray into the space.
It’s the earliest days for this technology so there’s still a fair amount of vaporware popping up, but it’s so early that it doesn’t really matter because it is altogether pretty unwise for you to pre-order any AR product, we’re just not there yet for 99 percent of the tech toting populace. Whether or not you get a smartwatch is a much saner early adopter decision you should be thinking about, there are still so so so many kinks to work out with AR interfaces, navigation, privacy concerns, and native development tools that far surpass the still very apparent problems with building hardware that is ready for the masses.
There are a lot of older companies and small startups looking to tackle the problems facing smart glasses and so many advances have already taken place, here are a few of the existing solutions out there that are available, soon to be available or promising availability, when in fact, who knows if they’ll ever actually ship.