Olympus is down to business with smart glasses for work sites

Olympus is down to business with smart glasses for work sites

(Tech Xplore)—Olympus has a new EyeTrek Insight EI-10 smart glasses for business use.

These have a 2.4-megapixel camera, said Michael Zhang on Monday in PetaPixel, and he described various features; one of them is that you can see the built-in display without blocking your vision. Olympus on its site noted they have a patented "Pupil-Division Optical System" that reduces the size of the display for a clear view of the surrounding environment.

Do the EI-10 glasses sound familiar? The header from New Reality: "Olympus Muscles in on Google Glass Territory with Enterprise AR Smartglasses." Brittany Roston in SlashGear thought the Olympus smart glasses looked "like Google Glass on steroids."

You might easily recall the din and media exposure on Google Glass when it was introduced in 2013. Since that time, there was a shift from everyman use to enterprise use. Google Glass has crossed over as an enterprise solution rather than as a consumer product. But the EI-10, also for business use, is flying solo.

PetaPixel said "the Olympus EI-I0 features an attachment mechanism that allows the system to be easily mounted to any pair of prescription or safety glasses."

Instead of mounted on its own frames, EI-I0 was designed to be clipped to safety glasses or prescription frames, in sync with work environments that could use something like this.

In Imaging Resource Jaron Schneider noted its embedded sensors, to allow for navigation of the user interface and applications. There are photo and video capture and playback, QR code reader, and utility functions for custom developed applications.

The EI-10 is Android-powered. It carries wireless LAN and Bluetooth technology for network connectivity; Next Reality noted a touch-sensitive bar to navigate the .

There is a diagonal 13-degree field of view positioned in front of the user's right eye, said the report.

Schneider reported that "using the device in person, we were rather impressed at how easily we could see the tiny monitor, simultaneous with most of our field of view."

The 300 mAh battery has a battery life of 30 to 60 minutes, depending on application. Olympus said it's a Li-ion polymer battery.

The company gave an availability date for the EI-10 as November 2017 with a price tag of $1,499.99.

"There's also a offered by Olympus, for companies looking to build their own applications for the device," said Tommy Palladino in Next Reality.

Why would anyone want to use this, especially when the price is not so very cheap?

A number of reader comments on PetaPixel offered good reasons. The desire to document processes in out-of-the-way places; quick access to reference images; using its connectivity capability to communicate with colleagues. An example was given of a specialist consulting on what the operator is seeing.

Applications are numerous—wearers reading realtime values, vibrations in pumps, boiler temperatures.

Roston in SlashGear spelled out its potential uses, "in industries where having on-demand access to visual data can make tasks easier, safer and more efficient."

More information: www.prnewswire.com/news-releas … tions-300550021.html

www.getolympus.com/smartglasses

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