Vue: Your Everyday Smart Glasses

Vue is the world's first pair of smart glasses that are designed for everyday use. Offered in prescription, plano, and sunglasses.

About this project

Meet Vue, the world’s first pair of smart glasses that are stylish and discreet.

   

At a basic level, Vue functions as glasses, meaning you will be able to order the lenses you depend on, whether they are prescription, non-corrective (plano), or sunglasses. 

Vue frames come with integrated technology, meaning your glasses will be able to do more than meets the eye. Vue’s smart features include:

   

And much, much more! 

  

Look great in your pair of Vue frames. Choose from a variety of different colors, textures, and shapes to help you express your own unique style.

We’re partnering with an FDA-certified lens manufacturer to provide you with the lenses you need. You’ll have the choice of prescription (including progressive), photochromatic transitioning, polarized, and prescription polarized lenses.

Note: After the campaign closes, we’ll send out a survey for you to pick your color and lens options.

   

We’ve all been there—sometimes the universe just swallows up our glasses. With the Find My Glasses feature, you can relax knowing that you’ll be able to find your frames again.

Vue uses bone conduction audio technology to transfer stereo sound to your inner ear without the use of earbuds. Your ears remain unplugged, so you can listen to music, answer calls, and hear notifications all from your glasses while still being able to hear the world around you. 

Navigate your Vue with a convenient touch interface embedded into the arm of the frames. Vue has no ports or buttons, ensuring that the experience is as least intrusive as possible. 

Just tap to answer calls 

Or swipe to cycle through songs 

Your frames function the way you want them to. Use the app to pair gestures with custom actions tied to your phone, like hearing the current time, weather, activity summary, and more.

   

Vue ensures you’re safe whether you’re a pedestrian, cyclist or driver. Hear turn-by-turn navigation without having to look at your phone. Vue’s open ear design allows you to listen to directions, music or calls without blocking your ears, so you can still hear traffic and the world around you. While driving, Vue checks if you’re looking down or outside the window for long periods of time and alerts you. Audio and LED notifications can help to nudge you back into focus, helping you to avoid accidents and get home safe.

When was the last time you stuck a USB into your glasses to charge it? We never had to, either, and that's why we made Vue easy to charge. Just pop it into the case overnight or when you're not using it, and Vue will get charged automatically. With the charging case, Vue’s battery lasts up to one week.

Vue turns on automatically only when you put them on, and enters low power mode when you take them off, enabling your glasses to conserve more power.

The launch of Vue is just the beginning. That’s why we’re opening up our API for developers to create their own custom gestures and features. Developers can access sensors in the frames, including the accelerometer, gyroscope and touchpad, to enable entirely new features for Vue.

Some of our early experimental features:

• Nod to answer a call
• Tilt your head to cycle songs
• Shake your head to ignore a call
• Detect your sitting and standing posture
• And many more

    

Vue comes in two styles of frames, classic and trendy.

Vue comes in a choice of three colors: black, brown or white.

Vue’s temple piece (sides of the frames) comes in the following styles:

   

    

Prescription Lenses 

Sunglasses

  

After the campaign closes, we’ll send out a survey for you to pick your color and lens options.

   

  

    

   

  

We're happy to have a solid prototype that we can take to contract manufacturers. Check out a few demos of the features in these videos below.

Audio

Activity Tracking

Mobile App

   

How well does bone conduction audio work?

Bone conduction technology allows you to hear audio while still being able to hear surroundings, which is useful when you still want to hear people talking to you, or hear traffic while driving, cycling or walking. It’s also an alternative to people concerned about potential hearing damage caused by earbuds. 

We’re working on refining the technology including designing the bone conduction pad to touch the correct part of your head on all head sizes, as well as reducing sound leakage from the frames so that all sounds gets transmitted to you directly without getting dispersed to guarantee high enough volume.

    

Our team was inspired to come together because of a common frustration—smart glasses have never seemed to be designed for people who actually wear glasses. With that in mind, we set out to design a pair of smart glasses with valuable features that we would love to wear each and every day. 

Over the past year we’ve created dozens of 3D printed and CNC prototypes, met with various electronics manufacturers, visited frames and lens factories, and worked to get Vue ready for manufacturing. Now we need funds for injection molds, FDA registration, and FCC/CE certifications. 

Our team met at the University of Pennsylvania and have worked together for more than 4 years. We have a diverse set of backgrounds—ranging from fashion and user interaction design, to medical devices and consumer electronics, to industrial design and manufacturing. We also participated in HAX—the world’s first and largest hardware accelerator, whose resources and mentorship we will have at our disposal beyond the campaign.

We have also built and shipped products before—most recently a smart Bluetooth headset Vigo. Our experience with that headset exposed us to all parts of the production process, including manufacturing in large volumes and shipping to 40 countries around the world. We also learned a lot about mistakes and delays that are commonplace in manufacturing. Ultimately, that experience is an asset to Vue—we aren’t going in empty-handed. We’re marching forward with a deep knowledge of manufacturing and shipping, including having worked on tooling, injection molding, PCB design and assembly, audio quality testing, noise cancellation optimization, FCC/CE certification, packaging design, and international supply chain logistics.