What North’s Focals AR Glasses Taught Me About Augmented Reality
First, I stopped by the Focals by North trailer at the event to order a pair and have my face scanned for fitting. After about 8 weeks they were ready...
This personalized experience made the Focals feel like a premium device, which honestly it is—it goes for $799 with prescription and $600 without.
The display brightness is plenty good even in broad daylight, but I prefer to wear sunglasses when I’m in the sun.
Design
Because the Focals look so much like regular glasses, they are much more socially acceptable than, say, my Snap Spectacles 3 glasses which I’ve had for a few weeks now.
The Focals use a single laser projector to fire what looks to be three different colors (RGB) onto a reflective piece of the lens. This creates a very small 1mm eye-box that enters your retina. It’s because of this incredibly small eye-box that North must get your measurements and calibration just right. From what North says, the next generation will have a 20x bigger eye-box and will be a lot better in this regard.
The glasses are controlled by a wearable ring. I like that North opted for this method, rather than touching the glasses on the side.
Usage
While I’ve been using the Focals on and off for the last few months, I have not worn them daily.
Though the amount of applications currently supported by the Focals is limited, one great thing is that they continue to support new apps every week based on what users are requesting. You can currently track your Uber with the Focals, read your OneNote notes for a presentation, check your to-do list with Todoist, check your Twitter, control your music with Spotify and more.
Coming soon: Focals 2.0
The next generation of Focals, coming in 2020, will sport a 7.5x increase in resolution to the display and have the 20x larger eye box mentioned earlier. The Focals 2.0 will also be dramatically sharper, with new focal depth and more dynamic range.
The future of AR
My experience with Focals by North taught me a lot about the future of AR and what does and doesn’t work. I think the team at North got a lot of things right for a first-generation product, but there are still a lot of things that need improving.
Tethering nReal’s Light glasses to a smartphone will likely be the best way to experience mobile AR for the near future—devices like Microsoft’s Hololens and Magic Leap’s ML1 are simply too big for consumers and lack cellular connectivity.
See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2019/12/12/what-norths-focals-ar-glasses-taught-me-about-augmented-reality/#15830c2b3fe5