Apple, who are no stranger to changing the world, seem to be following Google’s lead for once. Unless you’ve been living under an Internet-disabled cave for the past six months you’ve no doubt heard of the big G’s forthcoming Project Glass smartglasses. The glasses so nice they named em twice! Wait what? These impressive, yet unreleased, glasses have been turning heads since their initial announcement. All of that sweet, sweet positive press must have turned some heads in Cupertino as now Apple is also getting in the game. Hold on to your iPhone because iGlasses just might be on the way.
Now before we get into this, we gotta let you know that this is based on a recent patent filing by Apple and therefore somewhat speculative. These big companies tend to patent lots of stuff they never get around to actually making just so they have their bases covered if they ever do wanna take the plunge.
The patent describes a “peripheral treatment for head-mounted displays” that isn’t intended to be as mobile as Google’s Project Glass but rather a more static experience. This means, think more Holodeck and less smattering of info overlaid on the real world as you walk around. You would put these on when you actually want to do something with them and not just walk around with them all day like some kind of cyborg bozo. Nothing against cyborg bozos, by the way. We here at Crunchwear need to hedge our bets just in case an evil cyborg is reading this in the future.
This could be a very cool piece of technology but, as always, the company is playing it close to their chest. In any event it’ll be a year or two before any real information percolates to the surface. We’ll let you know when it does.