Meet the Glasses That Want to Replace Your Laptop
These Nimo glasses are not just trying to be the latest, must-have peripheral to enhance your computing experience. No, these revolutionary specs want to be the only screens you take with you wherever you go. They are a minicomputer that sits on your head and gives you six screens to work on while you are away from your desk.
Nimo Planet has been working on the glasses with a core team of ten people. The company is based in Kerala, India. They are hoping to take on the tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The glasses use the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 technology that enables a 60-inch display at a 3-meter distance. The development budget was only $300,000 and the team has been working on the product for four years. They have now launched a Developer and Enterprise program. Nimo Planet expects the glasses to ship in 2023. Initially, they will be available to customers in India and the US with a ticket price of $799.
Rohildev Nattukallingal, founder and CEO, of Nimo Planet says, “We have seen tremendous transformation in sound technology. From bulky sound boxes kept in the corners of a room, we have moved to headphones that give a hands-free high-quality sound experience with very less power. We are going to do the same for display and personal computing”.
The idea is that rather than having to carry around your laptop when you are out and about, you’ll simply need a lightweight Bluetooth keyboard or connect to your smartphone with the Nimo Planet App. Some glasses on the market offer you a tiny screen embedded into the side of each lens, allowing you to watch movies and play games without having to bring your mobile phone to your face. The augmented reality kind overlays information on the real world, the Bluetooth speaker kind gives you an up-close high-quality speaker and some even have a camera function.
But the Nimo glasses will give you real computing power. You will be able to work on your spreadsheets and presentations on larger-than-life screens. Gaming will become an entirely new experience in these glasses. For those who like to place a bet, you could be standing trackside watching the horses thunder by while simultaneously accessing online betting in Australia and checking the odds-on different websites. With six accessible screens comparing offers when shopping online will be as straightforward as a simple head movement.
The promising thing about Nimo Planet is that they are staying very focused on what they set out to achieve. They are not trying to make these glasses do everything. They are not adding augmented reality functionality or a camera for you to capture images with. They don’t have the inbuilt blue tooth speakers of another wearable tech; you’ll need to pair your earbuds or headphones to the eyewear. They also haven’t been designed to replace heavy lifting desktop processors that are needed for manipulating programs like Photoshop, but they will be perfect for word processing and project management software.
The safety glasses do not have 5G or LTE connectivity. They will need to be connected to Wifi or tethered to your smartphone to receive and send data. The developers are focussing on the benefit of having access to multiple screens which employers have found is beneficial to worker productivity.
It all sounds very exciting. The question is whether Nimo Planet will be able to deliver the promises that they have advertised. Many of the team behind the project were part of Fin Robotics company which developed the Neyya ring. This product was supposed to allow the wearer to use gestures that would control their devices like TV, speaker, and other paired tech. Nattukallingal was CEO and co-founder at Fin Robotics, but they didn’t manage to ship the Neyya ring to all the backers of its crowdfunding campaign. Internal turmoil and untrustworthy advisers were blamed for the failure.
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