Get smart about smart glasses: here are 4companies building futuristic AR eyewear

1.Vuzix Blade


The small public company’s smart glasses are among the most attractive AR glasses that seem primed to actually go on sale. I’m pretty excited for these. At CES this year, the company announced that Alexa support would be coming to the sleek-ish Android glasses which are currently still in dev kit phase and will likely be hitting shelves for $1,000.

Status: in development, company says it’s shipping to consumers this summer
More details here



2.Vue Smart Glasses


The Vue don’t house a display, in fact they’re more like a pair of bone conduction AirPods housed inside a glasses case, they connect to your phone and can give you audio notifications and you can take calls with touch controls and the integrated microphone.

Status: still in pre-order phase, the company says they have more than 25,000 backers
More details here



3.Epson Moverio BT-300


The company behind such things as… printers also has been surprsingly active in the smart eyewear space. Epson has focused its smart glasses efforts specifically on designs for drone enthusiasts so that they can have a real-time video feed of their drone’s onboard camera without completely blocking out the world like other drone goggles do. The Moverio BT-300 have a fairly unique design that is far from understated, but hey, these are actually shipping.

Status: currently on sale for $699
More details here

4.Rokid Glass

 

Rokid’s got big dreams but still quite a bit to work on. I got a chance to try the headset at CES last month and there are definitely some early signs of promise, though tightening up the distance between the display and pupil is going to be essential if anyone is going to wear this headset which integrates voice commands with a single-eye display. The Chinese startup has the money to do it now, they’ve just raised $100 million to expand their operations to the U.S. and expand their work on Glass.
Status: in development
More details here