Look out, Google Glass, you might have some competition.
Lumus is a manufacturer of heads-up displays (HUDs) for military uses such as fighter jet helmets. However, the company has an eye (get it?) for the consumer market as they recently unveiled the DK-40 dev kit. It looks very much like a sophisticated, upgraded version of Google Glass, complete with full frames and actual lenses.
The DK-40 gets rid of the separate glass that Google’s, ahem, Glass requires, in favour of something it is much more familiar with: a proper heads-up display. Using the entire lens, the device displays a 640 x 480 image on the lens in front of your eye. It also packs in a motion sensor and five-megapixel camera for those augmented reality games that are all the rage nowadays.
The DK-40 runs Android, so Google is still getting some play here, but the kit is still very much in development; we have no pricing or release date information outside of a promised CES 2014 showing. The company hopes to have units shipping to OEMs by the end of Q1 2014. In our eyes, a product like this either gets funded really quickly and has a great team behind it, or it fades away as quickly as it arrives. Given Lumus’s history with heads-up display technology, let’s hope they form the latter group.
We’ll see.