Hands On: Vuzix Wrap 920AR Video Eyewear

We got to sit down with some pretty cool augmented reality glasses at the Vuzix booth at CES. The idea behind the demo was showing off the head tracking and VR capabilities of the glasses, which you’ll see in our brief video above.

The stereo-camera glasses boast dual 752 x 480 image at 60 fps, one for each eye, and the image looks fine while keeping your head completely still. But once you start moving your field of view even slightly, the framerate takes a huge hit, making it almost impossible to see what you’re doing. In our demo, you slip on the glasses and focus your vision on the cardboard card in your hands. The glasses overlay a graphic onto the board and tracks graphic positioning using the unique characters (which looked like little space invaders to me) imprinted on the card.

So the deal with the game is pretty low tech… get the marble out of the maze. By changing the position of the card, the glasses (running through a PC) detect your movement and even add gravity, allowing the marble to roll just as it would in real life. There were a few obstacles to overcome in getting the ball out of the maze, and overall the demo really did a good job of making you think you were playing with a toy. At the end you could even dump out the contents of the box by turning the card over. Nice little touches like this makes me think we could be seeing a broader adoption of this technology in the future. It seems as if we’ll be wearing glasses for everything in the next few years.

The Vuzix Wrap 920AR Video Eyewear is going to retail in Q2 of this year for $799.00 USD.