The first word that comes to mind is “chunky,” followed by “plastic.” At best, it looks like a pair of Oakley sunglasses; at worst it’s like heavy-duty 3D glasses or a scuba mask. An Accuweather demo app displays the Earth; by moving my head, I could navigate to different parts of the globe. New York, The display doesn’t have the CRT monitor-like, flickering effect I’ve seen in other smart glasses. But until the Blade can play my music through my headphones or through the glasses themselves in a future model I don’t see myself using the Control feature often, if at all. Sometimes it’d make the connection, but if I opened the app 5 minutes later, it’d be disconnected and unable to reconnect. The glasses’ display only read “No music is playing on your phone. My glasses came with 5 games preloaded: Dino Hunt, Golf, Racers, Space Miner and Tank Battle. Crammed with a surfeit of advanced features, yet (nearly) identical in appearance to any regular piece of eyewear, the Vuzix Blades are the best smart glasses available in the market right now. I was able it to get it working with Spotify a few times. I found that their bulkiness makes them uncomfortable to wear for extended stretches of time, and, as of now, there just aren't enough apps to justify keeping them on your head.Credit: Tom's Guide. Cleverly, if you ask for something visual, like the weather, the Blades will display a week's forecast for your location. The Blades project an image onto the right lens; a small, 720p/8-megapixel camera that lets you take photos and videos is embedded in the left side. Vuzix recently put out a video called 'A day in the life with Vuzix Blade AR Smart Glasses', which shows someone putting on the B lade in the morning and heading out for a day … By comparison, the Focals by North smart glasses, which also cost $1,000 (ed. Vuzix Blade … Imagine you're walking down the street in an unfamiliar city, trying to meet a friend for dinner at a restaurant. Other apps include a bubble level, so you can see if something is straight or tilted, anda karaoke machine, which shows the lyrics as pre-loaded songs play. You can also make the box filled with white, by activating the glasses’ Light Mode. and the battery percentage next to a battery icon. Please refresh the page and try again. There was a problem. Early iterations, such as the Google Glass, were shunned due to their robotic, social-life-killing looks. Dino Hunt is first-person shooter style, holding you in a static position while you shoot dinosaurs with a tap of the touchpad. Vuzix Blade is an advanced pair of smart glasses with apps and image quality that’ll leave you impressed. To access Alexa, you tap the touchpad to turn on the display, swipe to Alexa (third menu item), tap to enter, tap a button that says “Tap for Alexa,” state your request and then tap the arrow at the bottom of the screen to let Alexa know you’re done talking. You can view photos taken on the Blade in its GalleryEx app. However, when it did work, photos uploaded to the app on my phone instantly and videos took about 2 minutes. When the AR display is on, there’s a visible bright light coming out of the right lens and onto your face, while a green LED power light also glows from the left arm onto your mug. You can’t rewind or fast forward the song. I paired my Blade with my iPhone SE. And when the AR display was on, a bright light (I saw it in various colors, including white, blue, green and purple) that you can’t miss projected from the right lens, creating a noticeable glare on the lower lens under my eye. The consumer version of the Blade smart glasses is available for purchase online for $999 or $1,199.98 with prescription inserts. Since this review focuses on the consumer version of the Blade, we tested out the consumer apps only. I could also hear the sound of my finger gliding along a smooth plastic surface every time I swiped. update: Focals reduced the price to $599) look much more like traditional specs; while they're not exactly wire-frame, someone would have to take a much closer look to know that there's tech inside them. No, we're not quite there yet, but the Blades have Amazon's voice assistant built in, so you can control smart home devices, check the weather and news, and more. The Blade has a built-in 8MP camera that’s also capable of shooting 720p video at 30 frames per second—simultaneously if desired. Vuzix Blade Smart Glasses come with a removable nose bridge. Android users can reply to incoming texts with pre-written responses that can be added to, edited, deleted and reordered, but that feature’s not supported in iOS yet. The Vuzix Blades I tested are the company's first-generation product; Vuzix plans to slim down the design over time, which is a good thing. Golf reminded me of the bowling game on the first Nokia cell phones with color, and Tank Battle takes advantage of motion sensors by letting your tilt and turn your head 360 degrees to target an auto-firing gun at cubes hurling toward your face. You'll have to go to your smartphone settings to configure what you want to receive as there's no way to filter notifications in the Blade app itself. I was able to look up the weather and play music on a Sonos One speaker; the Blades were fairly responsive, but on occasion, they were slightly slower than using an Echo Dot. Above the box toward the right tells you what direction you’re facing (N, S, NE, NW etc.) A game called Dino Hunt projects a pre-Cambrian jungle with dinosaurs traipsing about; by swiveling your head around, you can move the gun sight around this world, target the dinos and tap the touchpad to fire. I also test-drove Vuzix' thick Blade smart glasses two years ago, but those used a much larger Texas Instruments DLP projector called Cobra that Travers showed me in … However, their unflattering look, painful fit and tinted lenses means you probably won’t want to wear them all day. Are smart glasses the wearable of the future? After playing a game on the Blade for 5 continuous minutes at maximum brightness and volume and with vibrations, the two arms by the temples were 43.4 degrees Celsius (110.1 degrees Fahrenheit) on top and 43.6 degrees Celsius (110.5 degrees Fahrenheit) on the bottom. When the battery dropped below 15 percent, the green power LED would flash, which was a visible distraction in my peripheral vision. Shop at … Located in the right lens only, the display works with Vuzix’s proprietary waveguide optics, a component that guides electromagnetic waves into the electromagnetic spectrum human eyes can see, using its Cobra II DLP display engine with  Texas Instruments high-contrast DLP Pico display tech. After using the glasses for about 2 minutes straight, the arms both felt warm to the touch, but I didn’t notice that warmth on my face unless I paid very close attention. However, Vuzix does have plans to slim down the Blade. When shooting video, the display still auto-sleeps based on your settings (max time is 60 seconds). Vuzix Blade Upgraded Smart Glasses perfectly balance enterprise and prosumer … However, just using the Blade's camera to snap pictures is a poor waste of its abilities. 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