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Kickstarter Project Hopes to Create Social-Video-Sharing Glasses

Can’t wait for the Google Glass headsets to arrive? A company called Vergence Labs has some eyewear that just might tide you over until Google Glass is finally out of beta. The company has start...
Kickstarter Project Hopes to Create Social-Video-Sharing Glasses
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  • Can’t wait for the Google Glass headsets to arrive? A company called Vergence Labs has some eyewear that just might tide you over until Google Glass is finally out of beta.

    The company has started a Kickstarter campaign to raise $50,000 for what they claim are the world’s first electric-powered sunglasses. The basic pair of sunglasses the startup touts turns the glasses from shades to normal glasses with the flick of a switch. In addition, the specs have a 720p video camera on the bridge of the frames, allowing them to record a user’s-eye view to a microSD card. Kickstarter pledgers who pledge $199 dollars or more will get their very own electric sunglasses. The glasses currently only come in large, blocky frames. Luckily for Vergence, that style is currently popular, though the company is still working to miniaturize the components to fit them into smaller frames.

    Vergence hopes users of the electric glasses will upload videos they take to their future website, YouGen.Tv. The company suggests that users would be able to share their view of life and help educate the world on what they see. In reality, though, if these glasses take off as much as Vergence’s founders hope, they are going to be dealing with a huge chatroulette-type problem.

    Aside from the basic model of electric sunglasses, Vergence is raising money for it’s “immersive reality” visor glasses, seen above. The visor, which looks like something a fighter-pilot would wear, displays an overlay that can be programmed to interact with elements from the visor’s view. This is the same type of augmented reality that Google Glass promised with its announcement trailer, and it can be had for pledging $7,000 to the Kickstarter campaign. The device is only shown running some face-recognition software, but one Vergence co-founder claims the company hopes to implement gestural interfaces in the near future.

    That future had better be very soon, as the Kickstarter campaign estimates that both the electric sunglasses and the augmented-reality visor are due to ship before Christmas of this year. That gives the Vergence just over seven months to perfect something that appears to still be an early prototype. Watch the founders of Vergence Labs pitch their products in the video below, and decide for yourself if their ideas could be implemented by December.

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