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Design

Japanese Tech Company Demo Hands-Free Video Phone Glasses

Docomo release a hands-free video phone prototype.

There was once a time when video calling was the reserve of TV shows and films, now it’s everywhere and it doesn’t seem that big a deal. The transition from crazy technology of the future to carrying it around in your pocket nonchalantly just seemed to happen and nobody really gave a damn.

So where next for video calling, once flying high on Star Trek and now just a lowly standard on our smartphones and computers? Well, hands-free video glasses of course! But if you can’t wait for Google’s Project Glass to get their act together, then Japanese tech company Docomo have released their own prototype for HMD devices.

Which means you no longer have to go through all the effort of holding something, instead these glasses have six cameras with fish-eye lens. There’s three in the left and three in the right of the frames which combine pictures of you with a pre-rendered model of your face and send it to the recipient as a video. Which does mean the experience might feel a little uncanny valley as you converse with an avatar rather than a video image, but hey, you can’t have everything.

[via Diginfo]

@stewart23rd