Beyond Glass: Inside Epson’s Scheme To Make The De-Facto Smart Glasses

Chris Davies | Slash Gear | February 8, 2014

Epson can forgive you if your first thought when you hear augmented reality is Google Glass, even though you're wrong. Google may never had actually described its wearable as an AR device, but a combination of the over-promising original concept video and a general naivety about the segment overall led many would-be Glass wearers to be surprised at what the headset really is: a convenient notifications pane in the corner of your vision. If you're looking for true AR, though, Epson might have the answer. We caught up with the company to check out its latest headset, the Moverio BT-200, and find out why it's confident it can become the de-facto choice for augmented reality.

We're not unfamiliar with the Moverio BT-200. In fact, we briefly tried out the wearable back at CES 2014 in January, an update to the original BT-100 first released in 2012.

Where Glass has a monocular eyepiece pushed up out of your line of sight, the Moverio range goes in entirely the opposite direction. Each lens of the broad eyewear has its own display, and they're right in your field of vision when you put them on. Because there are two, and because it's independently controllable as to what each shows, the BT-200 can handle 2D and 3D graphics...