Google, Microsoft, Amazon Race for Augmented-Reality Glasses

Investors and inventors alike are banking on the notion that life looks better through today’s version of rose-tinted, augmented-reality lenses.

Augmented-reality glasses are among the most practical applications of artificial intelligence, and as the technology behind their development has matured, the range of uses for these glasses has expanded.

Several start-ups with deep-pocketed backers have made the boldest advances into the market. North, formerly known as Thalmic Labs, has put its efforts into its Focals by North – a product with augmented-reality capabilities that look like normal glasses.

“It’s about having a product that’s going to be useful for you throughout the day, all day,” says Stephen Lake, North’s chief executive officer. “Throughout the day, it’s wearable, it’s comfortable, and gives valuable bits of information that make sense at the time.”

North counts Amazon and Intel amongst its investors and has raised more than $100 million for the Focals by North design. The augmented glasses have a discrete display on top of one lens that provides abbreviated messages with information about the weather, directions and text messages.

General Market Maturity Determines Sales

Google and Microsoft are also working on possible ways to introduce the technology to a general consumer audience. Google was one of the earliest entrants into the consumer market, first introducing its Google Glass in 2014, which relied on the recent development of natural language voice technologyOpens a new window to give users the ability to communicate with the glasses in a hands-free environment.

The glasses, however, raised privacy concerns because of their ability to take photos and were pulled from the market in 2015. Despite the setback, Google is continuing to invest in development of augmented-reality glasses, but predicts that commercial viability may still be years off.

“We’re trying to determine what the best future will look like for other kinds of ways to experience augmented reality than just phones,” says Rick OsterlohOpens a new window , senior vice president of hardware at Google. “It will take a while for the technologies to mature. It will be a few years before that’s the case. We’re going to invest for a long period of time in that area as the technology catches up to where people want it to go.”

Microsoft has followed suit with its development of the HoloLensOpens a new window , which it describes as “the first self-contained, holographic computer, enabling you to engage with your digital content and interact with holograms in the world around you.” To do so, it relies on a range of components, including multiple sensors, advanced optics and a custom holographic processing unit.

Are Inward/Outward VR AR Lenses Too Much To Grasp?

High-profile start-up Magic Leap has developed glasses that superimpose virtual reality images into the physical world in an effort to try to capture the gaming and entertainment market. “Magic Leap has a more ambitious goal. It’s building futuristic mixed-reality glasses for everyday computing, hoping to beat bigger companies like Apple or Facebook to market,” says Adi RobertsonOpens a new window in Verge.

The company has raised more than $2 billion in funding, with an impressive list of investors including Google and JP Morgan. Magic Leap glasses holograms objects into a 3-D space, allowing the user to experience being part of an artificially-altered environment. Its headset includes tracking cameras that capture the immediate exterior environment as well as inward-facing cameras than can track eye movements.

One of the biggest immediate challenges faced by Magic Leap and others is persuading consumers that they need devices priced between $1,000 and $3,000 as the race towards commercial viability continues apace.

In that effort, they’re trying to anticipate which features will move the products out of the novelty category, according to Janko RoettgersOpens a new window . “Without an existing market for augmented-reality hardware, companies are left to guess what consumers actually want from these devices, resulting in widely varying implementations.”