Lenovo reveals smart specs that let you eyeball five virtual displays, with strings attached Lenovo has introduced “enterprise smart glasses” that it says can project up to five 1080p windows onto your eyeballs. Announced at the virtual CES trade show, the “ThinkReality A3 lightweight smart glasses” come with strings attached – or a USB-C cable, to be precise. Said cable connects to either a PC or Motorola smartphones …
Mark Pesce, a Reg columnist , VR/AR pioneer and author of Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing, said his first reaction to the device was to ask “Why?
If the 5 screens have to be in your field of view all the time Mark might have a point. If they can be placed anywhere and become visible when you look in user set directions it's a different matter. Working on a car? Have a pdf of the manual floating a head turn away. Working at your desk? Have more screens floating above & around your main screen or look in the direction of your front door to see the CCTV feed of who's just rung the doorbell.
So long as it's all processed locally I'm interested to know more.
Good points, these appealed to me as well. Also, the only time I look at my keyboard is to admire the dazzling waves of RGB rippling beneath my fingertips. It seems a little short sighted (ha) to disqualify the product on this basis. Some products are not for everybody, but these are sometimes the interesting ones.
Sir Pterry actually had 6 screens. The famous quote is: "Why six screens? Because I haven't got enough room for eight"
My home office has the laptop screen, a 24" 1080p screen above it and a 42" 4k monitor to the right of that that I've sub-divided into 4 x 1080p screens, Still wish I had more screens, but the laptop won't drive more and I've run out of room on the desk.
For me and several colleagues now working from home this would be useful (assuming it works well and image quality is good). Why? Well, my makeshift office space only has room enough for one monitor and a laptop, and even then it is squeezed in. A couple of my colleagues work on the dining room table and so can't add an external monitor (mealtimes, kids home schooling etc). So even just using it to display ONE virtual monitor becomes very useful, more would be heaven.
And also:
"Pesce also pointed out that it’s unclear how users will see their keyboards when wearing the glasses"
I thought these are AR glasses, so you still see the world through them?
Regarding who would want virtual tech manuals; one screen as an overlay of the area you're working on so the image overlays what is/should be there at 1:1 scale, one screen with written instructions/diagrams, one screen with parts list so you know what should (and should not*) be there, one screen with a how-to video of an expert doing the job properly and one screen with emergency contact numbers (department First-Aider, nearest hospital and local assassin-for-hire) for when some git of an ex-Matelot shouts your name and you sit up and hit your head on the bottom of the Upper Equipment Tray...
(*) Like adding extra locking nuts, bolts and a split washer to the pile after the apprentice removes the LRUs from a very expensive lawn dart. I can neither confirm nor deny this ever happened to anyone working at [REDACTED].
He later asked: [...] “Who needs five virtual displays tethered to a PC?"
Well, Terry Pratchett used a bank of six screens, and he wasn't even a software developer...
If I had room for that many monitors around my desk, you can be damn sure I'd be using that many, and it would save me a lot of time flicking between all the various windows (and browser tabs) I need for my day-to-day work. As it is, I'm having to make do with a measly three.
Multiple physical screens is a rather different experience than five see-through AR virtual screens.
Of course user preferences vary. Personally, I gave up on multiple screens around 1995 and haven't ever felt inclined to go back. And I am a software developer. But I recognize that there are people who would be interested in this sort of thing.
Almost certainly not. That's not a problem as I see it. Even if you have the space, power, and the massive desk needed to support five screens, they'll be very large and difficult to move around as you like them. These glasses could be used in much less space and you could also move them with you to have that much screen real estate wherever you work. It depends how you want to use them, but there could be several advantages to having all your screens in a portable unit.
I don't see that to be a problem. If you're connecting to your phone, you're already mobile. It should hardly be an issue to have a USB cable plugged in to your shirt pocket (pants may be a bit far for that - for those of us who are still wearing them).
I do see a problem in having a phone capable of rendering 5 screens at 1080p resolution. And if you're telling me that it's the glasses that are rendering them, I'm going to ask you what universe you come from and how did you smuggle your alien tech in ? Also, do you have gravity modulators, by any chance ?
"if you're telling me that it's the glasses that are rendering them"
USB-C (thunderbolt 3) allow for external GPUs. I am currently reading this on a such a device about the size of a thumb drive. (bigger monitor used as part of a homebrew docking station)
A Raspberry Pi 4 can do a 4K desktop with hardware accelerated video. 5 X 1080p is not far off regular 4K, and no word has been given to its performance or hardware acceleration abilities. You don't exactly need an RTX 3080 to browse web pages/edit documents.
I wondered about prescription lenses, but I supposed you might not need them to see a virtual screen on a surface close to your eyes. I'm not actually sure how the eye focuses on something like that.
Then again, you might need them to see the keyboard clearly, or to read paper manuals and write notes.
I currently do something similar with my Oculus Quest. 3 browser windows horizontally (~180 Degrees FoV), with the background being the "passthrough" of the tracking cameras.
I often wonder if they could detect QR codes or similar for the registration of Keyboards, and not overlay on those spots.
As for the glasses in the article, registration might not need to be particularly accurate. Projecting floaty monitors relative to your head only needs 3 DoF, and phones have been able to do that for a while. Keeping your peripheral vision in reality means no/less motion sickness. Exciting times ahead!
Edit: From the short concept video, it looks like there is a camera just above the nose. If the intent is that you are augmenting an existing display, it is trivial to include markers on the IRL screen. Then you place your virtual screens relative to that one. *shutupandtakemymoney.jpg*
I'm imagining this sitting at my desk at work. Give me 6 huge monitors in front of me and I'll put up:
3 different customers whose live environment I'm monitoring.
The Teams meeting that seems to have been live for 36hrs and is still going.
The email I'm working on.
The website I'm referring to while writing my email.
Build in headphones and a mic and the only reason I have to leave is to use the bathroom.
Make it so I can tether them to my phone and be able to seamlessly carry those displays with me and I can be doing what needs doing IN the bathroom.
(full disclosure, if you're on the phone with me you have about a 25% chance of me going and doing that while we're speaking anyway. It's just efficient use of time. :D )
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