Who Wants a $2,500 Industrial-Strength Digital Monocle for Christmas?

Now that 2012 is coming to a close, it’s time to look ahead at 2013, a year that many agree will change how we touch, use, and even think about gadgets. No, there’s not going to be a new iPhone coming out. Tablets will probably get a little bit better, but it’s doubtful that we’ll see anything that’ll really change the world. Jetpacks are about as impractical as they’ve ever been. So what’ll it be? How will technology reshape our lives next? To put it bluntly, we’re going to start attaching shit to our faces.

This shouldn’t sound too surprising. Everybody’s heard of Google’s Project Glass. We’ve seen the pictures of Larry Page wearing the still very mysterious device at conferences and stuff. He looks ridiculous. We’ve even seen a parade of super hot models wearing them at New York Fashion Week. Despite the hotness, they too look ridiculous. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that Google is hardly the only company making moves in the wearable computing industry. Other companies that don’t have multi-million dollar budgets to build buzz around products that don’t really even exist have been making wearable computers for years. With Google Glass making its slow move out the prototype stage as developers are offered access to the platform in early 2013, however, the market for these kinds of devices is about to heat up.

One company that wants to challenge Google directly is the Vuzix. (The name needs work, I know.) The Rochester-based company has a Google Glass competitor that’s nearly ready to go to market. MIT Technology Review just profiled the device, and to be perfectly honest, it sounds pretty much exactly like what we think Google Glass is supposed to be. According to the magazine, the Vuzix Smart Glasses M100 “contains a microphone, an earpiece, a camera, and motion and GPS sensors, and it’s powerful enough to run a version of the Android mobile operating system.” On top of that, the device comes equipped with WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity so it can pair up with your smartphone or tap into a local network. In fact, it’s designed to work—and, unfortunately, look—just like a handsfree Bluetooth device but with a screen that extends out of the earpiece.

The Vuzix Smart Glasses are a real thing and look like they’ll beat Google Glass to market. They even won the 2013 “Best of Innovation” distinction from the Consumer Electronics Show and will get featured at the show in January. But what makes the device really interesting is the industrial version that Vuzix is working on behind the scenes. Last year, the company demonstrated some really fun technology that could project images onto the wearer’s actual eyeglasses at CES and has been working on a jacked up version thanks to some support from DARPA. The greater goal in all of this is a true augmented reality experience, and whereas Google Glass and the Smart Glasses only display information in your peripheral vision, Vuzix’s industrial-strength wearable display can take up your whole field of view. They plan on launching a monocular version of the device as early as December. It’ll cost $2,500.

Things are going to get interesting when wearable computers do hit market. First, there’s the social stigma issue. “As a user, you need to opt in to the idea of a digital prosthesis,” says Natan Linder, a designer of augmented-reality systems at the MIT Media Lab, told Technology Review. “Consider how it would be to have a meeting indoors with a person wearing a Bluetooth earphone or even sunglasses—there’s some social awkwardness.” Seriously, guys. If Diane von Furstenburg’s model’s look this ridiculous, Frank from IT is going to look like a clown.

The second thing hits right at the heart of good old American capitalism. This industry is going to get real competitive, real fast. Sure, there’s the competition from small-time but experienced players like Vuzix, but don’t even think for a second that the world’s major technology are going to sit back and watch Google create a whole new category of gadgets. Just a week after Google pulled back the curtain on Project Glass, Olympus introduced its own wearable display, the “MEG 4.0 ultracompact wearable display prototype" with a "display [that] does not obstruct the view of the outside world.” They look like sporty glasses with a tumor where the hardware goes. And obviously, Apple has something in the works. The same week of the Olympus announcement, Uncle Sam awarded the Cupertino kids with a patent dubbed “Peripheral treatment for head-mounted displays.” The key sentence from the abstract: “Methods and apparatus, including computer program products, implementing and using techniques for projecting a source image in a head-mounted display apparatus for a user.” So Google Glass, but probably definitely prettier.

The list goes on, but the facts remain the same. Next year, we’re going to see an entire new platform rise up from the muddy terrain of hardware innovation, like a cyborg Golem with deep pockets. And it’s going to be awesome. In the words of a Forrester Research report from earlier this year, “Imagine video games that happen in real space. Or glasses that remind you of your colleague’s name that you really should know. Or paying for a coffee at Starbucks with your watch instead of your phone.”

Put these things on your Christmas list now folks. They might not actually be available for the holiday season this year, but when they are, there will be lines. At least when Apple unveils their digital monocle there will be, anyways. Maybe they’ll call it iEye.