Oakley Aims to Give Google Glasses Some Competition

Headphone lines are running into every ear and the world is constantly staring into its smartphones, seemingly hoping to be sucked into a virtual mobile world. It does not seem that anyone wants to go without their data at any second of their lives. After all, it could be crucial to know the so-called “Nasty Factor” of a pitch as it happens in the fifth inning of a game in April or to see a celebrity Twitter spat unfold in real time.

The good folks at Google and Oakley want to help you, the teeming data-driven masses, see just what is shaking at all times. Google’s “Project Glass,” which quickly became nicknamed Google Glasses, got some publicity recently when it emerged that the company was developing specs that would allow for data to be projected onto the lenses. Now Bloomberg is reporting that Oakley — also making some noise as an official sponsor of the London 2012 Summer Games — has been working on a similar product since 1997.

“Ultimately, everything happens through your eyes," Baden told Bloomberg, "and the closer we can bring it to your eyes, the quicker the consumer is going to adopt the platform.”

According to the Huffington Post, both of these glasses enter what Sarah Rotman Epps, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, calls "the next battleground for the platform wars": wearable devices. The Nike+ Fuelband and Nokia’s vibrating tattoo both entered this space in recent months.

"Within three years, having a strategy for wearables will be as important as having a strategy for tablets is today," Epps told HuffPost. "We will see wearables as the next big important category of devices to care about."

As SlashGear notes, "Exact functionality of Oakley’s prototypes has not been detailed, though both standalone and tethered modes should be supported. In the former, the AR glasses would be a self-contained system, similar perhaps to Oakley’s existing Thump MP3 sunglasses (below); in the latter, they would connect via Bluetooth to a smartphone, and could respond to Siri-style voice commands.'