For four-eyes only: The Google Glass future is here

CES is always a hard time of the year for me. Vegas in January embodies the best and the worst for the technophile set. A glittering nightscape of twinkling ice cubes in watery cocktails, flashing icons on screaming slot machines, and huge, blinking casino marquees hawking entertainment wonders from Don Rickles to something called the Thunder from Down Under — it’s a tough place and a fast lane coming this close after New Year’s in New York.

All that alcohol, all those lights, and all the other roiling vices that are said to always stay behind in Sin City, they make it hard to function during daylight hours. A day at CES is work, and if you’re still breathing through your mouth from last night’s scotch-soaked “Lion King” cast party at the Spearmint Rhino, you’re not going to make it.

After many years and more than a few mornings waking up feeling sticky in places I’d rather not remember, I’ve learned that the trick to CES is compartmentalization. Or to put it into terms a court-mandated substance abuse counselor might use, “Just take it one step at a time.” That’s the RXC strategy for CES: one step at a time.

But drug counselors get 12 steps, whereas I only have five to seven depending on the number of pre- or post-show event days. You have to pick your gadget fads carefully in this environment, starting with the Obvious, moving to the Curious, and ending with the Hidden Hotness. That last one is a pain to find, but since this is only Day 2, I don’t have to worry about it yet.

Four-eyes for the win

Today, I have to buckle down and do away with the Obvious. If you can’t guess what that is, you need to take your free Bud Light, step away from the blackjack table, and open your eyes. Because that’s what the Obvious is all about this year: your eyes — or, rather, what goes over them, namely glasses. Google Glass may have hogged the spotlight last year, but in the early days of 2014, the competition has taken off like racetrack greyhounds, and now there’s a slavering pack chasing the promise of the ocular bunny.

I’m not a young man anymore, so forgive my jaded perspective on these developments. In the misty times of our forefathers, I ventured to Vegas for the annual Comdex show, similar to CES but larger and with even less shame. With many other techno-journalistic nomads, I wandered that Geeklantis annually for more than half a decade before it sank into the desert, but in that time there was always one thing we could count on: the IBM Wearable Computer Guys. (At least, I think it was IBM; it’s hard remembering things before Wikipedia.)

Every year, Big Blue picked two names from the Employees We’d Like To See Less Of hat and sent them to Comdex with Batman-style utility belts (only bigger and clunkier) wired to various extremities I can’t recall, but especially to a pair of half glasses — meaning a set of glasses that allowed vision through only one lens, reserving the other for important electronic updates like the C: prompt. Every year we had a pool going: On which day and in which convention hall would one of these poor, depth-perception-deprived bastards take a header down a flight of stairs? Watching a flailing product manager tumbling backside over teakettle, bleating piteously with $100,000 worth of electronics swirling in the air around him is worth a generous laugh. But imagining that on a broad scale, a sidewalk-during-rush-hour scale or an Olympic-games-opening-ceremonies scale — well, that’s hilarious.

We’re heading that way, if this year’s CES is any indication. Google Glass is out in force, promising up and down that its pioneering headset will become widely available soon — real soon. It’d better because the other alpha dogs are right on its tail.

The glass gold rush

Wandering through the Venetian, you’ll find GlassUp displaying its new prototype spectacles (complete with steampunk smokestack action), as well as another set of shades, known as iOptik, from a company called Innovega that sounds like it came by its moniker from a Young Entrepreneurs name-your-startup contest. Vuzix is back showing Gen Two of the glasses it brought last year, and Lumus is hyping its own smart focals that look cool enough to attract attention — until you find out the company isn’t hawking the glasses, just the optics, which are, admittedly, pretty great. Big dog Epson America is giving the startups a run for their VC money in the Las Vegas Convention Center, flaunting its next-gen Moverio tech specs. There are more, but I’m getting tired.

The smart glasses I’ve mentioned so far are all similar in that they’re designed as either accessories or mini-personal computing devices — an extension of smartphones or tablets that should someday be able to perform all the functions of either, albeit with a touch of vertigo. But if you’re looking to get really nauseous, step up to the Meta Pro 3D “augmented reality” glasses.

Put it this way: Darth Vader would’ve worn these devil Ray Bans if he’d become a highway patrol officer. Also, they harken me back to the days of Comdex. Just like the balance-limiting IBM wearables of then, the Meta Pros of now are tethered to a full-on “pocket” computer packed with goodies like an Intel i5, 4GB of RAM, USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and all the rest. It’s smaller than what the Big Blue crew lugged around in their utility belts, but it has a much larger scope.

Meta Pro isn’t just adding information to your normal pedestrian experience — it’s looking to augment your reality. It does so by layering a bit of its own reality onto yours. You can wander through your 3D life getting 2D information with Glass and the rest, but you can also flick into a 3D environment, which the Meta Pro pocket computer allows you to manipulate with your hands. The best example is the demo app, which lets the wearer mold a virtual image, then birth it on a 3D printer. Yes, like everyone else, I have to say it: When you’re wearing them, the interface looks a lot like what Robert Downey Jr. was supposed to see in his “Iron Man” helmet.

Cool? Hell yes! But it gets a little scary when you hear the CEO talking about how this functionality will be shrinkable to a contact lens in a few years, then onto a chip that could be implanted behind your optic nerve — and he’s not alone. I don’t know if I want to walk around with this thing all the time. That could get irritating, like in the shower or during, er, intimate moments. What if your Xfinity TV stream gets stuck on CNBC or the Weather Channel? Tech support on cyborg peripherals could open the door to a whole new definition of “invasive” … but that’s getting beyond the Obvious, which is all we needed to cover today.

CES 2014’s Obvious is smart glasses; they really are here, you really will be seeing them on the sidewalk soon, and you really will be laughing when some wearers walk into light poles right in front of you. While you’re snarky about them today, you’ll probably succumb and buy one when the price falls below $200. And you’ll be especially happy to have them when they interface with your personal health monitor to let you know which bones you broke while falling down the stairs.