To fully appreciate Manser's experience, I put on an eye mask and let Aira agent Jessica Jakeway guide me through New York's Central Park. I've worn Glass before, which feel like typical glasses. But the added element of the eye mask makes everything seem a bit more .. alien. Jakeway warns me that most of Aira's users have some training, and my going into this cold is unusual. I understand her point after only a few steps. I'm completely disoriented from the start, and briefly consider ditching the experiment.
"This is actually a bit scarier than I realized," I say, inching forward along a path that my mind has sketched from memory, But after several paces, I grow more confident as Jakeway calmly steers me in the right direction, "If you were to iphone case 21 reach out to your right, I believe you'd feel that fencing," she tells me, "If you want to pause here, there's a gentleman straight ahead," she warns, Her own dashboard helps her point out the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, Danish author of "The Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes." (It's only after I take off my eye mask that I realize I would've never seen the landmark because trees block it from my view.)..
Tech evangelist Robert Scoble says people still "don't know why" they're uncomfortable around Google Glass. And before I know it, I'm at the Conservatory Water park, a handful of model boats bobbing up and down on the pond in front of me. I did stub my foot on a curb during my eight-minute walk, but had no disastrous crashes. Aira subscribers, who get a pair of smart glasses for free, pay up to $199 a month for 400 minutes of time with an agent. Google Glass currently pairs with a mobile hotspot, but Aira's working with AT&T (which has invested in the startup) to develop standalone smart glasses with their own cellular connection.
Beyond supplying the hotspots, AT&T worked with Aira to prioritize its traffic across its cellular network, ensuring the agents got a clear feed from their customers, according to Nadia Morris, who helps foster health care startups in Houston for the telecom giant, "People still feel uncomfortable with them and they don't know why," says Robert Scoble, the tech evangelist whose now-infamous photo of him wearing Glass in the shower turned him into the premier fan of the product, But things are changing, Microsoft on Wednesday launched a new "Seeing AI" app that lets your phone scan faces and even the scene around a visually impaired person and narrate the details, Google's new image-recognition system, called Lens, marks the search giant's next big push into AR, Point your phone's camera at a flower, for example, and Google tells you what kind it is, Point it at a restaurant, and iphone case 21 you'll see reviews and pricing information on a little digital card that appears above the building on your phone's screen, A logical next step is to see these developments jump onto smart glasses..
But Google Glass isn't the only smart eyewear in town. ODG and Vuzix, for instance, are building sleeker glasses that can access videos, apps and 3D images that you can walk around and gaze at from all angles. Oakley pitches its $449 Radar Pace as a voice-activated smart coach. Then there's Snap's Spectacles, which come in pastel colors imbued with a hipster vibe. Snap doesn't consider them smart glasses because they only shoot photos and videos, and you still need to connect them to a phone to post on Snapchat.