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Sony concept eyewear tech turns your existing specs into smartglasses

The Japanese tech giant's latest wearable concept deploys an OLED screen, and has the potential to slot right onto your existing glasses.

Luke Westaway Senior editor
Luke Westaway is a senior editor at CNET and writer/ presenter of Adventures in Tech, a thrilling gadget show produced in our London office. Luke's focus is on keeping you in the loop with a mix of video, features, expert opinion and analysis.
Luke Westaway
2 min read

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Sony

Don't like the thought of wearing Google's own-brand eyewear ? Sony's latest accessory concept aims to make smart glasses out of your existing spectacles.

The attachable system, which Sony dubs the Single-Lens Display Module, looks a little chunky, but packs some intriguing tech. Attaching to eyewear, the compartment on the wearer's right features a control board including a processor and Bluetooth tech, which is attached to an OLED microdisplay that beams a picture onto your glasses via an optical unit.

"By simply attaching it to a pair of fashionable glasses, goggles, sunglasses, or other type of eyewear", Sony writes in a blog post, "you can instantly gain access to visual information that adds a level of convenience to your everyday life".

The OLED display measures 0.23 inches diagonally, Sony says, but achieves a resolution of 640x400 pixels. The Japanese tech giant cites cycling, golf or other outdoor sports as activities that could benefit from a dose of wearable magic. Additionally, pairing the heads-up display with a smartphone camera will let you remotely monitor viewing angles, or -- we imagine -- peek around corners or over walls.

The smart specs are only a concept for now, so a release date and final design are still probably a long way off, but could one day make wearable tech a bit more accessible to the hordes of tech fans who already own their own prescription glasses. Google offers frames for its Glass gadget that can be fitted with prescription lenses, but that's still more hassle than simply using the specs you're already wearing every day.

The new system marks a departure from Sony's previous EyeGlass wearable concept, which was much more similar to Google Glass. The new model is going to get its first public airing at CES 2015, a major tech trade show in Las Vegas that kicks off in January, and earlier this year played host to Sony's tiny tennis sensor tech .

Watch this: Sony swings a prototype Tennis Sensor toward CES 2014