North Focals Smart Glasses

Digital Trends reviews.    Another attempt at smartglasses.   A sort of on-your-head rather than as a watch.   Integrating Alexa.  Need to be fitted, and are expensive at $999.   No camera, and more subtle and less geeky looking  than previous attempts at smartglasses.  Like many of these examples most useful for hands-free applications.

North Focals hands-on preview in DigitalTrends.

North’s Focals aim to keep you ‘heads-up’ with smartglasses

Never got a chance to try Google Glass for yourself? If you liked the idea of smartglasses but didn’t want to be labeled as a “glasshole,” you might be interested in giving Focals a shot. It’s a pair of glasses that shares similar features to Google Glass, allowing you to walk about in the real world with notifications and other data displayed on the glasses, meaning you can leave the phone in your pocket or handbag.

Focals is made by a Canadian company called North, formerly known as Thalmic Labs. We’ve covered Thalmic Labs before, as they created Myo, an armband that can detect gestures. The branding change to North is also a part of today’s announcement, and a reason for the change was that Thalmic Labs sounded too “techy,” according to North CEO Stephen Lake.

“It’s not the right brand for this product,” Lake told Digital Trends. “We started from a lifestyle/fashion perspective, saying we want to make amazing-looking glasses you’ll wear every day. And so, we wanted a brand that sort of reflected that as well. North means two things: One, it’s kind of the North Star of how technology should evolve and kind of this positive way of being there in the real world … and two, it just speaks to the origin story of being from the north instead of Silicon Valley.”

We spent some time with a pair of Focals and went through the process of making one — here’s what it’s like.  ... "