An Israeli optics company says it has developed a miniature video projector that turns regular eyeglasses into a personal video screen.
The technology, which until now has only been seen in movies such as Mission Impossible, projects a widescreen video image unnoticeable to anyone but the bespectacled individual.
Yaacov Amitay, Chief Executive of Lumus Ltd, says:
“What you can see here just simple eyeglasses. It is very thin, the thickness is
two millimetres and here we have a micro display which we can look at it as a
very tiny TV set.”
“Imagine you’re sitting in a meeting and you want to read an e-mail you just click a button on the phone in your pocket and you start reading away while you’re looking attentively at the person who’s giving the presentation,” Ari Grobman, business development manager at Lumus Ltd., said in an interview.
Lumus has been approached by major manufacturers of cellular phones and portable media players and expects the product to be on the market during 2007.
Motorola Inc. is listed as an investor in the venture capital-funded company.
The product can be used as regular, corrective eyeglasses, but it also creates an image matching that of a 70-inch television screen viewed from 10 feet away, Grobman said. “Currently we see a lot of people in meetings look down at their blackberries, simply, you know, look away from the person who is giving the a presentation which in often cases is something that is really rude. Imagine if you could be wearing your glasses, no body even knows that they are video glasses.”
The difference between this eyewear and ordinary spectacles is only in the small, black box attached to the earpiece that receives the video signal and projects it into the lenses. The light waves then travel through fiber optics within the lenses where they are enlarged and directed at the eyes.
Aside from watching movies and checking e-mails, Grobman said the technology will eventually provide drivers with virtual navigation through GPS.
Several mobile phone companies and the makers of portable media players have shown an interest in the glasses.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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