Wearable technology has steadily taken off over the last few years, and while the big winners are selling activity trackers and smartwatches these days, there’s been some real development concerning glasses. Google’s Project Glass might be in hibernation right now, but virtual reality is starting to take off in earnest, with commercial products like the Gear VR from Samsung. Augmented reality is something that’s been around for some time now, and a lot of games as well as smartphone apps use this to their advantage. The idea with augmented reality is that images and object are overlaid in relation to the real-life feed from say a camera on your smartphone and it enhances the reality in front of you. ASUS is working on a pair of augmented reality glasses.
During an earnings call earlier this week, ASUS CEO Jerry Shen confirmed that “It should be next year when we come out with a product, we think AR (augmented reality) will be very important for people’s lives.” Just what ASUS have planned for such a technology is unclear, but we’d assume something to do with either helping people navigate around large cities or some sort of gaming application. Shen has been known to over-enthuse about unreleased products in the past, but augmented reality is not as lofty a goal as virtual reality is, and with the current technology available should be quite doable on a fairly low budget, compared to the development of something like Sony’s Project Morpheus for VR.
Shen went on to say that “you can make a real setting meld together with yourself and the AR (augmented reality) portion. Internally, we are talking about how to prepare.” This suggests that there has already been some development gone on for something like this, and we’re sure that ASUS won’t want to release a product that isn’t compelling for users. Either way, it looks as though 2016 is to be an interesting year for technology as virtual reality becomes more attainable and the likes of ASUS join in the fun as well.