Epson’s announced local availability of its Moverio Glasses in Australia, beating Google to the punch — although it’s not hard to think that Google might not care about Glass all that much.
You can’t officially buy Google Glass in Australia, although that clearly hasn’t stopped plenty of pairs of Google’s much-hyped and equally much-derided AR glasses from hitting these shores. What you can buy are Epson’s take on AR glasses, the Moverio BT-200, which sell a little cheaper than Google’s effort at $849 locally. Epson has its own app store for the Android-based glasses, and in a release touts their use at a number of Australian universities for research purposes. Which is all very well and laudatory, but what are they like to use?
I notably wasn’t a big fan of Google Glass when I had the chance to try it, and Google doesn’t talk that much about it any more in any case, but I recently had the chance to test out the Moverio glasses in New York thanks to a developer friend who’d hacked his to access alternative app stores.
Unlike Google Glass, where I genuinely struggled to get any kind of focus picture at all, because they’re not terribly glasses-friendly, the Moverio pair slipped nicely over my own glasses and presented a clear field of view — although they are obviously a bit more obvious when you’re wearing them. Netflix (which isn’t standard, but as noted I was wearing a pair that had been modified to work with Amazon’s App store) on these things works very well indeed — and could be a factor come March next year for Australians, officially speaking, at least.
The jury is still very much out as to whether wearable computing in the form of glasses is something that’ll have widespread social acceptance, although items like these, and even the Gear VR headset that goes with the Galaxy Note 4 shows some of the entertainment potential. Would you go out in public wearing something like this?