Apple Smartglasses And The World Of Tomorrow: A Sneak Peek

Is Apple on a mission to reinvent eyeglasses?

Perhaps, and the resulting technology could ship in glasses with virtually infinite adjustments to your changing vision over time, never mind bifocal or trifocals for nearsightedness and farsightedness.

But that’s just the beginning.

“I hear they have 19 different prototypes that they’re working on, which shows the effort that Apple’s doing,” tech analyst Robert Scoble told me in a recent TechFirst podcast focused on a recent Apple patent win. “This is a multibillion dollar effort going into eyeglasses and thinking through literally everything.”

One part of Apple’s project is better glasses for better vision: exactly what glasses were initially invented for. Another part is significantly more transformational: a complete reimagining of human-computer interfaces.

Essentially, it’s the next major leap in technology platforms.

Along the way, Apple might just disrupt the $120 billion eyewear market the same way it devastated the Swiss watch industry with Apple Watch. And, give everyone technology that for now exists only in F-35 fighter jets.

Every major tech company is now working on smart glasses. Google launched Glass years ago, retains an enterprise version of the product, and just bought North, a Canadian manufacturer of light, natural-looking smartglasses. Facebook just revealed an early version of its “holographic optics for thin and lightweight virtual reality” in a research report. Intel has been dabbling in smartglasses for a couple of years now, Amazon has a limited-availability product with Alexa, Amazon Echo Frames. Microsoft has Hololens, which barely fits the category due to size and complexity, and dozens of startups and smaller companies are also investing in glasses that don’t just show you the world as it is, but overlays it and in some cases mixes it with data and images.

Part one for Apple seems to be about the basics, according to a patent the company just received: correcting vision.

“What they’re wanting to do is you put on a pair of glasses, and it sees inside your eye and bends the optic ... in a way that corrects your vision perfectly, so you don’t need to go to an optometrist,” Scoble says.

The goal is that one pair of glasses can adapt for different vision conditions. Up to 75% of adults use vision correction, and for some, their vision can change by the month. Others, of course, use bifocals or even trifocals to focus properly at different distances, which presumably this technology could manage in real-time.

The next level is notifications, and it’s what much of the low-end smartglasses space has focused on. These glasses are barely smart at all: most simply show notifications from your phone. Even that is a step up, of course: one selling feature of the Apple Watch initially was that it reduced the need to look at your phone so many times, since notifications appeared on your wrist.

Well, it turns out that looking at your wrist in social situations is even less polite that checking your phone momentarily; it carries the connotation of checking the time and therefore, being bored with your present company.

With smartglasses notifications, the alert would be right in front of your face. Essentially, it would be invisible to anyone you’re with. Still rude, perhaps, but less intrusive as well.

Part three is where the game really changes and we enter an era of “spatial computing,” augmented reality, mixed reality.

Data access becomes ubiquitous, even ambient, but even more sophisticated options become available.

“Now you can compute while riding a mountain bike, or driving a car, or walking to a shopping center,” Scoble says. “You can replace the floor and make it something new, different, like a video game. You can then fly things in the air and they could bounce off the walls like balls, because this thing understands the 3D space it’s in. That’s why we call it ‘spatial computing,’ because you’re now computing as you’re moving through space ... no longer are you tied to the little rectangular pieces of glass to compute: you can compute on literally everything.”

That’s really what Magic Leap and Hololens are trying to accomplish: not just painting reality with a few pixels for notifications. That’s interesting, but it’s evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Smartglasses truly worthy of the name will mix real and virtual worlds to create new capabilities, like those currently enjoyed by F-35 pilots.

“This radically changes all sorts of jobs, right,” Scoble told me. “It already changed the F-35 fighter jet pilot. If you want to fly an F-35 plane and you’re in the Air Force, you have to learn how to use augmented reality. And one of the pilots told me ‘I will never lose to an F-16 because I can see him and he can’t see me because I have augmented reality glasses’ ... that lets him see through the plane to the F-16 underneath him. So he can see underneath, because magic, right? We can now visualize the battle space in a new way.”

And not just the battle space.

Factory lines. Traffic jams, including the cars around corners or behind semi trucks. The surgery room, and the human body. (I was recently pitched on an augmented reality technology that surgeons were using to be more accurate.) Public speaking (if public speaking ever comes back) with your own personal teleprompter right in your field of view. Directions. Insights and meta-data about new places you’re traveling. Public notices in shared virtual space so we don’t have to clutter up the world with physical signs, and much, much more.

Essentially, it’s a revolution in human-computer interfaces, a paradigm shift in computing. We started with punch cards, moved to screens. Graduated to graphical user interfaces, moved to mobile, and now we’re looking at wearing the technology instead of just holding it or accessing it.

“This next paradigm shift is computing that you use while walking around, while moving around in space,” Scoble says.

That includes virtual reality, VR, and augmented reality, AR (or mixed reality, MR). Over time those use cases will collide and a single device that looks something like an ordinary pair of glasses will manage all of them. That’s essentially where smartglasses are heading, and Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all want to be at the forefront of a new revolution in technology form factors.

One thing it’ll change?

Fashion, because what you’re physically wearing — or even what you actually look like — won’t necessarily limit how you portray yourself to others.

“Facebook is planning on doing all sorts of magic stuff when you meet a friend in the street it’ll go beep and all of a sudden I’ll see your 3D costume that you just bought, something made for you, right?” Scoble says. “I’ll be like ‘Yeah, nice costume’ ... in ten years, we’re going to have Burning Man 24 hours a day in the streets?

Which of course will bring an entirely new set of privacy concerns along with it, as every adopter will be wearing cameras and sensors, and major platforms will want a piece of that.

That’s probably one reason why Apple is working so hard right now to be the face of big tech privacy.

Get a full transcript of our conversation here.