The first augmented-reality (AR) glasses with Amazon.com Inc’s Alexa voice assistant is to be shown next week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas — manufactured by a 75-employee company rather than the e-commerce giant’s growing devices division.
Vuzix Corp is to show off a pair of “smart” glasses that can talk to Amazon’s voice-activated digital assistant and display information to the wearer’s field of view, Vuzix chief executive officer Paul Travers said in an interview.
Vuzix’s Alexa integration is part of an Amazon program that allows third-party hardware manufacturers to put the digital assistant into their products. In October last year, Sonos Inc unveiled a smart speaker with Alexa’s system for controlling music playback.
The strategy is designed to put Amazon’s service, which generates revenue for the company, in as many places as possible to sell more products.
Amazon confirmed that Rochester, New York-based Vuzix’s device will be the first smart glasses with Alexa.
The company is “excited about the potential of the glasses and the ability to bring Alexa to customers in a new way,” a company spokeswoman said.
Voice assistants and AR products are to be highlighted at CES. Executives from Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant are to be seeking new partners and other big technology companies, including Apple Inc and Facebook Inc’s Oculus division, will be at the show behind-the-scenes as they ramp up their virtual reality and AR products.
AR is a technology that superimposes digital information such as maps, text messages and more onto a person’s view of the real world, while virtual reality submerses a user into a completely different digitally created world.
Vuzix is to release its AR glasses by the second quarter at a cost of about US$1,000, Travers said.
While it is a high price point, “the ultimate goal is to have it under US$500 and we’ll be able to do that” by next year, he said.
Wearers, who must be Amazon customers or become Amazon customers to enable Alexa’s capabilities, could for example ask the digital assistant to pull up a map or display sports scores on the glasses.
Amazon has not said whether it will release its own branded smart glasses with Alexa, but Travers expects it to happen.
“I think everyone is going to come out with glasses sooner or later,” he said.
Apple is aiming to have the technology ready for its own AR glasses by next year so that it can release a device by 2020, Bloomberg News reported last year.
Oculus said it would this year release a US$200 standalone virtual reality headset called the Oculus Go that does not require connectivity to a PC or smartphone.
Google was an early player in AR glasses, launching the Google Glass prototype before pulling back and focusing on adding AR features to its Pixel smartphone and releasing an enterprise-oriented headset.
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