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August 10, 2013 01:40 am GMT

Meta, The AR Glasses That Aim To Be What Google Glass Is Not, Go Up For Pre-Order

METAOver a year after the announcement Of Google Glass, many folks I talk to still seem to be misunderstanding what Glass can actually do. “It’ll be great for Augmented Reality!” they say, assuming that Glass can render objects directly into your full view of the world (it can’t.) “Ooh! It’ll be like Minority Report!”, expecting Glass’ camera to pick up your every hand wave (it doesn’t.)l Then they try on a pair and realize that well, that’s not what Glass is. But it’s what Meta is aiming to be and their first (read: still a bit rough) version is going on sale to the public starting today. To picture the Meta, picture a pair of glasses or, more accurately in its current stage, a pair of safety goggles. Put a translucent, reflective surface in each eye piece, displaying images on top of your field of view as piped out of a tiny projector built into each arm of the frames. Take a couple tiny RGB/Infrared cameras essentially a miniature Kinect and strap them to the frame. That’s the Meta. The Meta then plugs into another device to help it with the data crunching; right now, that’s a laptop. Moving forward, it’ll be your phone. After flying under the radar for a bit over a year, Meta debuted itself to the world on Kickstarter back in May. By the end of their campaign, they’d nearly doubled their original goal of $100,000. They promised to ship those units to their backers by the end of this month, and they say they’re on track to meet that deadline so now they’re opening up pre-sales of the next iteration to everyone. To be clear, the hardware they’re launching today is still quite early. It’s perhaps a bit past the “Developers Only” level, but it’s still mostly meant for the hardcore early-adopters and tinkerers. Hell, its early state is reflected in its very name; this model is called the META.01, suggesting many a revision to come. The META.01 units are going up for sale at $667, with plans to begin shipping in November. The company has pulled in a few hardware designers since their Kinect-taped-to-glasses days, allowing this iteration to be considerably more svelte than the Kickstarter variant that came before it. The Meta.01s will still be a bit more cumbersome than the final hardware they’re hoping to ship, but

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5oQmJnADxB0/

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