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Focals by North - Glasses with a holographic display only you can see 👓📲🤓

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Focals are custom-built glasses with a transparent holographic display only you can see. Focals let you see and respond to texts, get turn-by-turn directions, check the weather, request an Uber, talk to Amazon Alexa and more — all without looking away from your surroundings or calling attention to yourself.

Pre-order now: shop.bynorth.com

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This has potential, if they can extend the functionality through a developer ecosystem etc, but even Apple Watch has had difficulties getting big brands on board. The only thing close to a killer feature I currently see is having a shopping list in front of your eyes. The key ring prevents you from using it while cooking or heavy exercise etc. I don't know if this is just the marketing spin, but the current product doesn't jump out as being a "must-have" product functionality-wise. It's disappointing that there are only a couple basic utilities, which are already adequately useful with other (cheaper) wearables. Maybe everywhere-access to Alexa is the thing to lean on. But I love the vision in the blog post of giving you superpowers, I just don't see it yet. Show me how this fits into my life and how nothing else on the market can do what this does.
Maker
Thanks for the feedback Tom!
Looks like a scene from a Kingsmen movie... Amazing to see it as a reality now! 🙏 🙌 Curious - what's the ring for? (next to the glasses in one of the stock photos)
Maker
That's Loop, it's a small ring with a 4-way joystick that lets you interact with Focals!
Congrats on the launch guys! This feels like the right progression from Glass.. super exciting! Judging by the site + Alexa integration these won't be tied to any particular OS? Ps. love the new name 😉
Maker
We learned a lot from watching and using Glass and we've made some very deliberate decisions based on those learnings! In terms of OS, works with both Android and iOS. PS. Thanks, we do too 🤓
so cool! Any idea when you'll have prescription lens ready to ship?
Maker
Shipping prescription as well as round frames in 2019!
When will notifications for other applications be available? Was it a conscious decision to leave out social and email notifications made because the volume of these people get every day, hour, or even minute get would go against Focal's philosophy of being unobtrusive tech ‘designed to be off’? Would it feasible to make a whitelist of important email senders and social contacts you'd want to appear on your Focals? Although I haven't used Alexa in Canada, my understanding is that its functionality in Canada is much more limited when compared to Google assistant or Alexa in the US. For Canadian users, isn't this going to make our Focal experience not as good as US users?
Maker
Alexa functionality is mostly at par now for Canadian 🇨🇦users with a couple small caveats. We are working actively to make sure this is fixed 😃. In terms of notifications, we have included smartphone notifications in the experience but are very focused on figuring out ways to enable a more "present" approach to how you consume and deal with your important apps and services. More to say here in the future!
I hope they integrate speech-to-text, as that would be a transformative feature to those suffering with hearing loss.
Maker
Definitely have leveraged the power of voice-to-text in many places on Focals. Help me understand how this will help those with hearing loss? I'm assuming you mean that it would be helpful to convert what people are saying to the user into text? If so, that is different then how Focals currently work.
Correct, exactly. That kind of assistive feature would also be very useful in loud places (such as a restaurant), and even more useful if the text could be translated on-the-fly. Imagine being in another country where the Focals wearer doesn't speak the language. Being able to maintain eye contact with others in those scenarios would be a much better experience than looking down at your phone for the translation. I would be interested in learning more about how Focals work, from a technical perspective.
we create all sorts of immersive content at BrandXR. How can we start building experiences for Focals?

A THOUSAND DOLLARS (and that's just to reserve!) for a device that tells you the time, and other stuff that you can get looking at the phone you already own.

Pros:

discrete

Cons:

Very expensive

Happy to see these release!! Hoping there's a back-ally Waterloo showroom I can check them out in ;)
Maker
"There when you need it, gone when you don't" 🙏🏼
Maker
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