Being comfortable in public and knowing what to do with your eyes is natural to some, but a nightmare to others. To help you with the social discomfort, Dr. Hirotaka Osawa from Tsukuba University, in Japan, has developed the AgencyGlass. They’re a pair of glasses outfitted with OLED screens, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, a camera, and a micro controller. The idea is that if you’re having trouble figuring out just what to do with your eyes, these could do it for you.
The digital eyes blink when you nod or shake your head, look up when you tilt your head down and (best of all) it stays open even while you doze off, all thanks to a gyroscope and an accelerometer that detects head movement. That’s not all they can do, though — the eyes also automatically look up when the system determines that a person is looking at you, as taken by the accompanying camera.
As you can imagine, the AgencyGlass is not commercially available. But the idea of using technology to help wearers overcome something like social discomfort (or what Osawa calls ‘Emotional Labor’) is a good one and we hope to see more of this kind of technology make its way to consumers in the future.
[ IEEE Automaton ] VIA [ Engadget ]
