A local company is showing off new technology that could eventually help you get additional uses out of your Amazon Alexa app.
If you’ve got an Amazon Echo Device, you probably have used the digital assistant, Alexa to read you the weather.
But what if you could not only hear that forecast from Alexa, but also see the weather prediction being depicted in a very realistic way across the inside of your new smart glasses?
That’s a product developed right here in Rochester, by a company called Vuzix, which makes virtual reality and augmented reality glasses. A lot of those products are targeted for use by large companies, to be used in places like warehouses.
But at the big CES consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas this week, the company is showing of a new model of those glasses, called the Vuzix Blade, which company founder and CEO Paul Travers says is a lot lighter and more comfortable to wear than those gaming device virtual reality glasses you may be familiar with.
“I would also say, I believe that the Blade is one of the first pair of smart glasses that have wave guides in them the way that we do that weigh less than three ounces and that have a form factor that, quite frankly, people would wear versusstuff that you might wear in your living room,” Travers told WXXI News.
He says the idea is, that you could “pop your glasses on and the world that’s in front of you is now augmented appropriately with information to help you get through the day and that is really hard to do on a phone today; lightweight pair of glasses, tied into a high speed interface into a phone,” Travers said.
The new glasses would pair with your smartphone.
They’ll be on the market later this year, and they will be pricey, about $1,000, but Travers says the hope is to eventually have them for sale for under $500.
