Olympus has released images of it's prototype Meg 4.0 augmented reality system vis its website.
Meg 4.0 isn’t a full set of glasses, so much as a rather large stem that you attach to your glasses, positioning the Meg’s display just above your line of vision.
The display has a 320 x 240 pixel resolution, and it’s attached via Bluetooth to a mobile phone or tablet you’re carrying somewhere on your person.
The idea would be you can run any augmented reality app you like on your phone - perhaps a mapping or points-of-interest app, or perhaps a gaming app - and the output from that app, appearing on that tiny screen, would provide an informative overlay to your normal vision.
With the processing, GPS and mobile data needs all taken care of by your phone or tablet, Meg 4.0 doesn’t have to do much except maintain that Bluetooth connection and display a remote screen, meaning its battery life can be rather long: Olympus says you could use it for eight hours, provided you only use it in bursts of 15 seconds once every three minutes.
It also has its own accelerometers and compass, so it knows which way your head is pointing.
The system is quite different from the Glass technology Google announced a few weeks ago. Google’s units are more self-contained (they don’t rely on a phone or tablet), and the glasses themselves look much prettier than the Meg 4.0.
It’s interesting, though, that Olympus is getting into the augmented reality game, because it suggests a background in miniature screen technology might be all that’s required to produce augmented reality glasses.
Olympus is in the miniature screen business courtesy of its digital camera business. Many of its cameras have electronic viewfinders, which, when you think about it, aren’t all that dissimilar to augmented reality: they overlay information (f-stops, shutter speeds, zebra stripes etc) on top of a view of the world. That’s the very definition of augmented reality, in fact.
Now, Olympus’s electronic viewfinders are very good, but there’s another Japanese manufacturer that makes even better ones: Sony.
Sony’s EVF’s are unbelievably sharp, to the point where it can be hard to tell whether you’re looking at a screen or an actual, optical view of the world when you look into them. If Sony got into augmented reality, now that really could be a sight to see.
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