Epiphany Touts Smartglasses With Fashionista Appeal

Epiphany Eyewear has launched a range of smartglasses that can record and share video and cost from $299 (£179), much cheaper than Google Glass.

Cory Greiner, company’s director of marketing and sales, told eWEEK that the classic look of the glasses mean that it isn’t competing with Google and is piositioning the wearable device as “GoPro for your eyes.”

Motorola Senior Vice President Rick Osterloh made headlines last week for saying at Mobile World Congress for saying  that he found existing wearables “all extremely ugly.” Grenier responded by sending him a note informing Osterloh of “one exception.”

Fashion Appeal

Epiphany, for now, makes a single design – a classic Ray-Ban Wayfarer look. They arrive as sunglasses, but a pair of clear lenses come included in the case. The glasses include, in the top right corner of the frame, an HD video camera. To start and stop recording, the wearer taps the logo on the frame’s arm. (A blue light turns on to alert others that the glasses are recordings.)

The glasses include 8, 16 or 32GB of solid-state storage and can connect to Amazon’s cloud storage services. Users can share video to social networks directly from their glasses, download video to a computer or other mobile device (via mini USB cord) and edit the video however they’d like. They can also upload any kind of file from a device to the glasses, using it as flash drive.

Users can also upload video to ugen.tv, a site that Grenier says is like “YouTube without the advertising” and that Epiphany plans to do more with.

It’s all pretty simple, and so is the pricing: $299 (£179), $399 (£239) or $499 (£299), depending on your storage choice. (Google Glass, which includes many more features – basically everything your smartphone can do – is priced at $1,500/£898.)

Epiphany is also working on add-ons, such as a sporty clip-on feature that integrates with an app to measure “heart rate, speed, cadence and power,” and a detachable augmented-reality display.

Budget Wearables?

As is, the glasses have obvious consumer appeal, and early user videos show people wearing the glasses while mountain biking, skate boarding, performing to a full concert venue and catwalking. (Models wore them during the BCBG Max Azria show during New York Fashion week.) But it’s their price point – if not partially also their very ordinary look – that might encourage businesses to open their doors to smartglasses and consider the capabilities they might enable.

Grenier says Epiphany has been approached by a pharmaceutical company, a few consulting companies and a national retailer that was considering letting employees wear the glasses to record the customer sales experiences. Epiphany expedited a few pairs to the Olympic Committee in Sochi, Russia, and another pair to a Ukranian national who wanted to film the protests there without drawing attention to himself. (Some footage is on ugen.tv.)

Angela McIntyre, a research director with Gartner, said many of the companies that are beginning to pilot smartglasses – glasses with embedded cameras – are in manufacturing environments, warehousing and field service. There are also opportunities, she told eWEEK, in training, field sales and inspections, “where maybe you want a video record of something you’re inspecting.”

BYOD Impact

Wearable camera solutions – smartglasses with augmented reality, like Google Glass, are a “little more tricky,” she said – “whether in glasses or clipped onto hats or a lapel, if you’re an officer, those are already being piloted and deployed in the market now.”

For some enterprises, McIntyre continued, an important feature is that the glasses are rugged, or can be worn with safety glasses over them; for others, it’s about comfort and whether a field service worker can easily wear them all day.

“Another thing is building security into the video stream,” she said. “Some products will have encryption built into the streaming video, which is streamed to a secure server. That’s important if you’re taking video of proprietary equipment or processes.”

McIntyre offers examples of other companies in the space. XoEye Technologies offers eyewear (priced between $500/£299 and $600/£360) that can take photos and video, includes microphones and speakers for two-way audio communication, and can connect to the cloud and interface with third-party developed apps. Pivothead makes smartglasses with a built-in 1080p HD camera (the lens is on the nose bridge, positioned between a user’s eyes) for $269 (£161). And a company called Visual Mobility makes a version of the Pivothead that can also connect to a smartphone.

Grenier says Epiphany believes “smartglasses should be accessible to the public,” and its styling and pricing are a commitment to that. But the company also isn’t stopping there.

“We’re not a single-product company,” he said. “We’re a labs. We like to tinker. This is Day One of what we hope will be a 100-year company.”

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Originally published on eWeek.