The Vue wearable glasses, V-frames if you’re cool, are now live on Kickstarter. They’ll not only work with your prescription, they’ll stream music, track your activities and take calls for you. They do all this without compromising style.
(Source: memegenerator.net)
If have to wear corrective lenses anyway, the added features may be worth it, especially if the cost is equal.
The biggest problem with the current wearable eyewear options is that most what is available ain’t pretty. We were fans of the Shima lenses, but for some people, these aren’t ideal. Not everybody wants a heads-up display.
Vue looks like a normal pair of frames. They pack in just enough technology to make them valuable, and you can customize them to your experience. The question everyone would like answered is, what’s the deal with bone conduction?
Style
(Source: kickstarter.com)
The Zungle Panthers are the closest thing to The Vue smart glasses, but those only offer one frame style. Vue offers not only two frames, with a variety of different lenses and frame colors, it seems like so much more.
First, you pick from either the classic or trendy frame style. They both offer the same tech, but we’ll come back to that.
Your color options are black, brown or white. If you’ve shopped for lenses before, you know how much of a difference lens color can have on the appearance of those frames, especially when you pair that color with the lenses.
A white frame with tinted lenses versus the same frame lens in black with clear lenses appears wildly different.
What’s more, Vue offers five temple styles, ink black, carbon fiber, chocolate brown, wood or baby blue. Lens options include tinted, polarized and clear lenses.
For someone who the Zungle Panthers didn’t ring the style bell, these may work better.
Technology
(Source: kickstarter.com)
The makers of Vue have a working prototype. They’re crowdfunding for manufacturing costs. That’s exactly where you want your Kickstarter.
Inside the temples of Vue, they’ve hidden a touchpad, a microphone, processor, proximity sensor, accelerometer, and battery.
The bone conduction speakers connect to your smart device via Bluetooth 4.2, something many wearables do not yet have. The upgrade to older Bluetooth (4.0 and 4.1 versions) means faster downloading and better privacy [read: no tracking].
The touchpad you use to activate various features of the glasses. The 6-axis accelerometer is what tracks your activity.
They are rain and sweat-resistant, last 2-3 days on one charge depending on your use, and charge wirelessly. That is a whole lotta tech for glasses, especially glasses that don’t look like something Frankenstein’s monster would wear.
Best of all, the experience of Vue is customizable. Utilizing the companion app, you can set the parameters of the touchpad to do what you want Vue to do.
Bone Conduction
(Source: kickstarter.com)
You can hear things two ways. in most cases, sound travel down your ear canal to your eardrum. The drum gathers those vibrations, sending them to the brain for downloading.
The other way is through your skull. When, for example, you plug your ears or go underwater, the whole ear canal system doesn’t work as normal.
Sound waves still travel. In fact, they travel better through solids in many ways than they do through the air.
With bone conduction, the sound runs behind your ears, vibrating your skull enough that your eardrum “hears” the sound. The advantage is bone conduction does not impair your normal hearing.
You actually get a broad spectrum of sound, bass, and treble, but without blocking ambient sound. This means you will hear the approaching emergency vehicle or the guy shouting “look out.”
Better sound, without isolation, plus less [read: zero] damage to your eardrums, equals a valuable sound experience.
(Source: kickstarter.com)
For us, the V-glasses bump the Zungle Panthers as our favorite eye-wearables, but just barely. The fitness tracking features and style options of the Vue set-up are just more versatile.
Similar to the Panthers, the only reservation we would have is transitioning from outdoors to indoors with the darker lenses. If you were in the middle of a call, that could prove problematic. The easy solution would be transition lenses, but first, a successful Kickstarter campaign.
To find out more about Vue or support them on Kickstarter, head over to their site.