ODG R-7 Smart Glasses are wearable technology designed for people with macular degeneration or visual impairment see. In January, Osterhout Design Group presented the R-7, the company’s seventh-generation device. The glasses are an Android tablet the user can wear. They are programmable by a wide range of developers – via ODG APIs and an SDK* – for a diverse set of applications. A pair of R-7s is a high-quality movie player, an augmented-reality and virtual-reality headset. Built to include sophisticated sensors like gyroscopes, magnetometers, and accelerometers, as well as the latest Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and voice-recognition systems, a 4-megapixel camera, global navigation satellite system technology, and a powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor, R-7 users have options for what to do with the glasses. It’s possible for the screen to automatically block all light coming in from the outside, or to use R-7 Smart Glasses as an augmented reality system that can superimpose all kinds of data over the user’s view. There’s also “assisted reality,” where the user can, for example, look at someone and have that person’s bio pop up, or where the user a can be trying to assemble something, and instructions automatically appear on the screen as a step-by-step guide. Or the user can watch a movie on the R-7, and it’s the equivalent, in terms of how their eyes see it, of watching on a 65-inch HD screen from eight feet away. Each lens features an independently driven 720 pixel lens capable of showing content at 80 frames per second and with full 3-Dimensional visualization. ODG developed its own Android-based operating system for the glasses, known as Reticle OS. Those individuals with macular degeneration struggle with things like central-vision loss, requiring significant magnification in order to decipher things like which letter of the alphabet they’re looking at. The R-7 offered the ability to give patients glasses with sophisticated variable magnification and contrast adjustment. The software has voice inputs, which lets users speak their commands to the glasses, things like making text bigger or smaller, or changing the color. They can say, “NuEyes, watch TV,” and it will stream TV in a way that the user can see. The glasses can also incorporate telescopic lenses, which when used to magnify something, don’t pixelate the content.