K-Glass: Wearable Tech For Foodies

Researchers have developed wearable technology that enables foodies to check out a restaurant’s menu just by looking at its signboard.

Asian Scientist (Feb. 26, 2014) – Walking around the streets searching for a place to eat will soon be no longer a hassle with K-Glass, a head-mounted display (HMD) developed by researchers in Korea.

The device enables users to find restaurants while checking out their menus: If the user walks up to a restaurant and looks at the name of the restaurant, the day’s menu and 3D images of the food will pop up. K-Glass can even show the number of tables available inside the restaurant.

This new wearable technology is made possible by K-Glass’ built-in augmented reality (AR) processor. Unlike virtual reality which replaces the real world with a computer-simulated environment, AR incorporates digital data generated by the computer into the reality of a user.

With the computer-made sensory inputs such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data, the user’s real and physical world becomes live and interactive. Augmentation takes place in real-time and in semantic context with surrounding environments, such as a menu list overlaid on the signboard of a restaurant when the user passes by it.

According to the researchers, K-Glass’ new AR processor is the first in the world that works like human vision, duplicating the ability of the human brain to process visual data, picking out only the most relevant information from the environment.

It is also energy efficient, enabling high performance with good battery life.

“Our processor can work for long hours without sacrificing K-Glass’s high performance, an ideal mobile gadget or wearable computer, which users can wear for almost the whole day,” said Professor Hoi-Jun Yoo who led the research team.

“HMDs will become the next mobile device, eventually taking over smartphones. Their markets have been growing fast, and it’s really a matter of time before mobile users will eventually embrace an optical see-through HMD as part of their daily use. Through augmented reality, we will have richer, deeper, and more powerful reality in all aspects of our life from education, business, and entertainment to art and culture.”

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Source: KAIST.
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