Oakley is no stranger to creating innovative lifestyle products that are of the highest quality. Their groundbreaking sunglasses are vouched by the best athletes out there for a good reason. Now, the American company has unveiled a limited-edition cape that fuses with their high-end glasses.
Fit for a futuristic world, the Oakley Moonveil design is limited to just 100 pieces and carries the original concept art from Dark Horse’s Genesis comics. The artwork is done by Oakley product designers and carries a Moonveil image on the backside. There’s no word on the pricing of this exclusive piece, however, the availability is promised in September 2024, directly from Oakley’s website.
Oakley has created a brand new headwear category in the industry with this product that foresees a better life outside the bunkers in the future after the Doomsday effect settles down. The unique headwear will be featured in the Future Genesis Chapter One, and according to Brian Takumi, Oakley’s Vice President of Brand Heritage and Creative, “We are connecting the worlds inside and outside of Future Genesis through a vision of empowerment and revolutionary innovation in design.”
In-house designers were able to blur the boundaries of innovation with this self-contained piece. Using State-of-the-art Physiomorphic Geometry, the design got the freedom in form, resulting in an enhanced wearing experience. Adaptability and flexibility are at the core of this jet-black cape with integrated sunglasses. The rotating system of the knitted cape allows the user to toggle between the dual Prizm lenses. One of them is the Prizm 24K lenses for maximum eye protection when the sun gets too harsh. The other is Prizm Low Light lenses which enhance vision with in-built light transmission for low-light conditions.
The front of the balaclava-style cape has a zipper placket for a tailormade fit that allows the wearer to quickly switch between styles. It can be adorned in an open style or zipped-up protection configuration for harsh weather or a sense of secrecy. The headwear cum eyewear will be perfect for athletes, photographers and mountaineers who venture out in extreme weather conditions. The level of flexibility and attractive styling of the cape makes it one of Oakley’s best-ever creations.
In the bustling streets of Bucharest, Lunet Eyewear has unveiled its latest spectacle, a whimsical wonderland that blurs the lines between reality and imagination. Romanian practice Bogdan Ciocodeica Studio has once again pushed the boundaries of interior design, this time crafting an optical oasis that celebrates the essence of blurry vision.
Drawing inspiration from the very purpose that brings customers through its doors; the quest for clarity in a world of blurriness. Lunet’s newest store is a testament to the power of narrative-driven design. The concept is bold yet intuitive, as pixelated furnishings dance against translucent latex curtains, inviting customers into a realm where perception is questioned and celebrated.
Situated in the heart of Bucharest, this marks the third collaboration between Bogdan Ciocodeica Studio and Lunet, with previous ventures in the capital and Cluj-Napoca setting the stage for innovation. Unlike its predecessors, this store avoids the classic trappings of color and metallics from their previous designs, opting instead for a playful and pixelated ambiance that invites visitors to explore its depths.
At the forefront of this visual symphony are the shelves, strategically punctuated with pixel-style cutouts that mimic the blocky form of their digital counterparts. These tall wooden structures serve as both showcases and canvases, housing Lunet’s eclectic range of eyewear while simultaneously blurring the lines between art and function.
But the pixelated magic doesn’t stop there, gridded tile flooring lays the foundation for this playful palette, while cutouts in chairs, rugs, and service desks continue the theme with finesse. Each element, meticulously crafted and thoughtfully placed, converges to create an environment that is at once nostalgic and futuristic, those columns and arches created by the shadows seem like a modern interpretation of Romania’s architectural heritage.
In between the wooden pillars, the walls are painted in a burnt sienna color with translucent latex curtains draping gracefully between shelves, these ethereal veils add depth and texture to the space, enveloping patrons in a cocoon of visual intrigue as they navigate the store’s diverse offerings. They also have a touch of industrial aesthetic, a mix of brushed metal and mirror cladding, keeping in line with the original concept of the first Lunet store.
At the heart of Lunet’s pixelated playground lies a seating area, where wooden chairs with pixelated edging offer leisure amidst the chaos. Beneath them, a burnt-orange rug adorned with pixel-shaped openings provides a whimsical peek into the store’s underlying grid, inviting guests to linger and explore.
In the eye test room, brick-red walls set the stage for surrealist graphics that challenge perception and defy convention. Here, Lunet invites patrons to see beyond the ordinary, to embrace the blurred lines between art and reality as they embark on their optical journey.
Eyewear fashion, I believe, is a constantly evolving realm and a new contender has emerged, disrupting the status quo with its bold and distinctive design. Tangled Eyewear, as its name suggests, embraces the beauty found within the chaos, presenting a captivating blend of disorder and elegance that challenges conventional aesthetics. If you’re a fashion enthusiast, you’re going to love what’s coming!
When you first see Tangled Eyewear it definitely appears as a statement piece, commanding attention much like a messy situation draws our gaze. However, upon closer inspection, its intricate design reveals a harmonious fusion of chaos and sophistication. The chaos and elegance of its tangled frames serve as a poignant reminder that beauty can emerge from the most unexpected places.
The concept of an ‘organized mess’ is a familiar one to many, particularly in today’s fast-paced world. Just as we might navigate through the chaos of a cluttered room with ease, Tangled Eyewear invites us to embrace the beauty found within the tangle. Its intricate design echoes the complexity of modern life, yet within its chaos lies a hidden order waiting to be discovered.
Tangled Eyewear pushes boundaries with its embrace of disorder. Through high-end 3D printing techniques and unconventional shaping possibilities, each pair of Tangled glasses is a testament to the creative potential found within apparent disarray. The result is a dynamic design that captures the eye and sparks conversation.
What sets Tangled Eyewear apart is its commitment to both style and functionality. The ergonomically modeled frames cater to both prescription and sunglasses wearers, ensuring a comfortable fit without compromising on design. With frames and sides hand in hand, Tangled Eyewear offers a seamless blend of form and function.
One of the most impressive aspects of Tangled Eyewear is its versatility. Whether you’re attending a lavish party or a corporate event, these frames are sure to make a statement. The key lies in the choice of color, with options available to suit any occasion or outfit. From vibrant hues to understated shades, Tangled Eyewear offers a solution for every style dilemma.
One of the things that I have to accept as a person that’s getting older and that has bad eyesight is the fact that I can’t read books with small fonts anymore. I’m not yet at the point where magnifying glasses are actually needed but I know we’ll eventually get there. There are more convenient ways now of using magnifying lenses instead of the old school way of actually holding a lens in one hand with the reading material on the other hand. This concept for magnifying glasses is something I may eventually want or need.
Designer: Jongcheol Yang
The VAN magnifying glasses concept fixes the problem of unnecessary parts that may cause inconvenience or even dizziness to those that need to use this kind of glasses. The idea is for this to be similar to reading glasses in a sense that you only wear them when you need to use them. The magnifying part is only placed on the lower part where the magnifying lens is located. And when you’re feeling dizzy or you need to rest your eyes, you just have to look straight ahead since the lens part will not be there anymore.
The other cool thing about this concept is that if you don’t need to wear the glasses, you can just fold up the front and then the “legs”. It will then turn into the classic magnifying glass that we’re used to and then you can store it in your bag. They don’t show it in the product renders but maybe if you just rotate the lens itself away from the stem, then you can use it like a regular magnifying glass without having to wear it as actual glasses.
It’s an interesting concept for sure, particularly for people who already have a hard time reading things that have small prints. Of course it’s another thing to add to things you need to bring and to mind. But at least it solves some of the issues that come with current magnifying glasses.
The idea of putting a wearable on the eyes that takes immersive interaction up close and personal is a mantra every tech company wants to recite. After the bigger ones like Google and Apple doing their bits in VR and AR glasses, a startup, Brillant Labs has developed a pair of AI glasses called the Frame that promises to put the power of generative AI in front of a person’s eye. This, as the company says, will introduce a paradigm shift in an individual’s daily living.
The Brillant Labs Frame is designed as the first-ever glasses with an integrated multimodal AI assistant. This assistant is built in-house and can learn with the usage to carry out tasks for you. On that point, some of us would remember the Rabbit R1, but the little rabbit is a handheld and the Frame is a circular pair of spectacles that resembles – in design – the ones made extraordinary by the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Steve Jobs.
With a primary focus on AI capabilities, the Frame is backed by AR John Hanke, CEO Niantic, company behind the popular Pokémon Go. The dual combination of technology is accompanied by a small display. The 640 x 400p micro-OLED display can show graphics and text overlayed on a real-world environment. In the middle of the Frame is a camera and the battery powering it is stationed at the back.
The Frame weighs only 40g and to ensure it is a new leap in wearable technology, it comes with the always-on AI assistant called Noa. The assistant taps into generative AI models like GPT-2, Whisper AI, and Stability AI, to generate text and graphics from the images captured by the camera, in response to the user query. The multimodal generative AI assistant therefore performs real-world visual processing and real-time speech recognition and translation to permit a user to engage more with the world around.
Courtesy Noa, the Frame will bring new experiences to everyday life, in workplaces, or even in classrooms. This is as the glasses can respond to what you ask by voice or text, and also to what you are seeing through them. So, you can, in real-time have the Frame tell you the price of jeans you are looking at in the store (by checking up online) and take notes of the content you are reading from your textbook.
Brilliant Labs has left the Frame as an open-source project with files for hardware and software available through GitHub. Additionally, it comes with support for prescription lenses for an additional price of $99. The lightweight, stylish, and visually distinguishing Brillant Labs Frame itself costs $349 and is now available for pre-order. Shipping is likely to start from April 15, 2024.
It might sound like an oxymoron, but your run-of-the-mill sunglasses don’t actually use glass. To comply with certain legal regulations, “shades,” as we sometimes call them, have to use plastic or resin materials that are more resilient but have poorer optical quality. That’s true even for those expensive sunglasses, which will probably make you feel a bit cheated, especially when you notice how unclear your vision behind these plastics really is. Thankfully, the optics industry has reached a point where we can have the best of both worlds of durability and optical clarity, creating the industry’s first modern sunglasses made from actual glass, designed to deliver clarity, comfort, and protection to your eyes with an accessible price point.
Designer: Ilija Melentijevic, PhD (founder of Kolari Vision)
These ‘plastic’ and ‘resin’ lenses come with a lot of responsibilities, given the fact that they’re tasked with protecting your eyesight. When you wear tinted sunglasses outdoors, your pupils dilate to let more light in – which effectively also exposes your eyes to more harmful rays… and while most lenses will block out UV rays, current sunglasses (even the expensive ones) aren’t designed to block infrared light from hitting your retina. It’s ironic that you can find IR-blocking lenses for your expensive cameras… but not for the most priceless camera we have: our eyes.
Enter Kolari Shades, a pair of sunglasses that is shaking up the market by bringing the highest-quality materials to a product you can actually afford. Harnessing more than a decade of experience in the photography space, Kolari brings a new kind of lens that is actually made of glass, providing the optical clarity that your eyes need all the time, whether you’re wearing sunglasses or not. But it’s not just plain glass, either, but the same ultra-strong Corning Gorilla Glass that has been protecting smartphone displays for years. And with 51 layers of anti-reflective and anti-smudge coating, your new premium specs are protected against scratches, dirt, dust, and more. Plus, it’s easy to clean the smudges off, too!
Kolari Shades are truly color-neutral and protect your eyes from all damaging wavelengths of light.
But while Kolari Shades’ glass lenses provide extra-clear vision, it doesn’t forget the protection that sunglasses are expected to bring. In fact, it levels up this aspect by blocking not only high-energy UV light but also low-energy infrared, both of which can be harmful to your sensitive eyes. It can even protect your privacy by blocking security cameras that use IR for face recognition. And it brings this superior protection without turning your world into a dreary shade of gray or brown. By using color-neutral coatings, you can stop worrying about those harmful and blinding rays and continue enjoying the world in full color.
Corning Gorilla Glass and titanium frames make the Kolari Shades extra tough.
The best part about the Kolari Shades is their affordable price tag, even though Kolari Shades are more costly to manufacture because of the premium materials used in the frames and lenses. It’s significantly less than luxury sunglasses that use plastic lenses, offer poorer optical quality, and strain your eyes in the long run. Why settle for plastic products that harm rather than protect your eyes when you can enjoy the optical quality that real glass lenses have to offer? With the Kolari Shades, you can enjoy durability, clarity, and protection in stylish sunglasses that don’t change the colors of your world.
Smart eyewear is back in fashion, especially thanks to Apple finally announcing the Vision Pro. Although its design pretty much still falls under the “headset” category, the ultimate goal of many of these wearables is to be as inconspicuous are regular spectacles or sunglasses as possible. Easier said than done, of course, especially when you need to cram plenty of electronics in such a small space. There are advancements in that area, of course, to the point that it might be possible to fit almost all the necessary components on or near the lenses. That kind of technology will open the doors to a wider variety of wearable designs, including one where you can swap frames to be as sporty or as classy as you need your mixed reality eyewear to be.
Designers: Ben Melvin, Jo Barnard, Dan Lloyd, Harry Mason (Morrama)
There are actually quite a number of designs for smart eyewear, depending on how complicated they need to be. Some include more complex computers and the usual design involves a headband that you wear around your head. Others simply mirror the screen from your phone or computer, so they can just look like overgrown sunglasses. But if you can settle for something even simpler, you might be able to condense everything around the lenses so that the frame is really just a frame, one that you can even replace more easily than with prescription glasses.
Morrama Issé is a concept for mixed reality eyewear that takes advantage of such a design by making the lenses and the frame two connected but independent pieces. The lenses are not your average pair and look more like sports visors. The rim of the visor is quite thick which is where all the electronics will be hidden. In other words, the visor can function on its own without the frame, and the frame only provides the structure that will hold the visor up on the wearer’s face.
This means that the frames are interchangeable, letting the wearer choose the style of the frame depending on where they want to wear the mixed reality goggles. These can be rugged or elegant, at least as elegant as possible considering the rather thick frame required to support the weight of the visor part. More importantly, however, the frames can be made using more sustainable and recyclable materials since this part usually has a shorter lifespan.
The Morrama Issé design is no Minority Report or Tony Stark, and you will still look conspicuous if you will be wearing such eyewear in public. Of course, the primary use case for the wearable will be for fitness, where the goggles will provide the relevant biometrics and information that people need when training or exercising. It’s pretty much the same data that your smartwatch would show, except it will always be within your field of vision. Not everyone will find the aesthetic that pleasing, but Issé’s innovation is how it is able to envision a more modular approach to designing mixed reality eyewear, especially with a bent towards more sustainable options.
Apple’s Vision Pro costs $3499, Meta’s Quest Pro had a launch price of $1499, and Microsoft’s Hololens 2 as well as the Magic Leap 2 Developer Edition were both priced upward of the $3000 mark. AR headsets aren’t cheap because of all the complex data they’re made to process in a matter of seconds. However, technology like the NEON Eye Tracker may help make the technology a lot more affordable by cutting down research and development costs. Built by the folks at Pupil Labs, Neon is a modular attachment that clips onto the nose-bridge of specialized eyewear. Armed with multiple cameras that point at your eyes as well as the world ahead of you, the Neon helps track your vision as you perform various activities from working to playing sports, traveling, or doing something that requires a specialized skill set. The gathered data helps “power scientific research and enable eye tracking applications beyond the possibilities of today”. In short, better spatial content, and hopefully more affordable VR/AR/XR headsets.
What powers the Neon is that tiny module that fits right in the middle. Designed to conveniently sit right between your eyes without really obstructing your vision or interrupting your ability to engage with the world around you, the Neon’s eye-tracking module helps capture data of what your eyes look at, creating a heat map of the world around you based on regular as well as specialized scenarios.
The tiny modular unit packs all the necessary technical components (such as high-speed eye cameras, a wide-angle PoV camera, stereo microphones, and inertial measurement units) in a very compact space. The inconspicuous module can be inserted into a range of frames, which are tailored to different application scenarios. Contact points on the front connect to the circuitry within Pupil Labs’ frames, which then allow you to connect charging cables through the ear-stems, easily powering the Neon without having any large charging cables obstructing the wearer’s vision.
The Neon starts working the second you wear the glasses. No need to fiddle around with nose pads or camera positions, or even to calibrate the module beforehand. The module begins working the instant it’s powered on, offering crucial, actionable data in all sorts of environments including the sunny outdoors as well as complete darkness. All the technology is encased within water-resistant silicone, making the Neon just about as weatherproof as any existing eyewear.
The module automatically uploads its readings to Pupil Labs’ secure cloud framework, reducing the latency between data gathering and analysis. The cloud dashboard also offers advanced machine-learning tools like gaze mapping and scene understanding algorithms on the data gathered by the Neon module. The hope is that the democratization of these tools and the data gathered from them will help craft better real-life as well as virtual (or spatial as Apple calls it) experiences that put the user front and center.
The beauty of the Neon isn’t just its compact form factor, it’s also the fact that it’s designed with modularity and scalability in mind. While Pupil Labs offers an entire variety of frame types that support the Neon, its geometry is essentially open-source, allowing you to develop your own frames or modify your specialized eyewear/headsets to fit the module. This could be prescription glasses, protective eyewear, sportswear, glasses for children, minimalist frames that just hold the Neon without any lenses, or even AR/VR headsets that can now track the wearer’s gaze for more user-friendly and data-driven metaverse experiences.
Constraints form a major part of a designer’s process. Whether it’s constraints based on materials, manufacturing capabilities, technology, or even just budget constraints, designers work well within those boundaries to create the best solutions possible… but what if there were absolutely no constraints? What if everything was left open to possibility? That’s what designer and educator John Mauriello shows with this video, where the sky is practically the limit. Relying on $200,000 printers from Stratasys, and technology that’s so cutting edge that consumers can barely afford it, Mauriello created the wildest set of sunglasses we’ve ever seen. Ergonomics, aesthetics, and design guidelines be damned, Mauriello’s sunglasses are absolute statement pieces, showcasing the themes of earth, wind, fire, and water. Moreover, they explore a set of circumstances that most designers don’t get to explore – a highly elusive ‘what-if’ scenario where money, material, and manufacturing are all open-ended.
Before we begin, none of these glasses are designed for the mass market. In fact, they’re experiments that aren’t for sale… but instead, form a core part of Mauriello’s design exploration and education approach. You can follow John’s YouTube page “Design Theory” to learn more… and if you want to design and print your own frames without shelling out $20,000 for a fancy top-of-the-line printer, scroll to the bottom of the article to learn more about Xometry – a website that 3D prints your designs and delivers them to your doorstep.
A lot of a person’s emotions get expressed through their eyes, and sunglasses hide that. It’s why people wearing sunglasses look mysterious to the extent of appearing ‘cool’. That became the starting point for Mauriello’s ideation. “That’s actually why I came up with the four elements idea,” he said. “I liked the idea of a natural disaster happening around your face, but you still look cool and calm and collected to the outside world. Plus I really liked Captain Planet as a kid…”
To design these outlandish sunglasses, Mauriello resorted to an unconventional design direction that he just wouldn’t get to explore with a paying client. It involved a lot of sketching directly in VR using Gravity Sketch, before taking the templates into Houdini to actually simulate effects like fire, wind, water, and earth. For Fire, Mauriello experimented with flames, embers, and sparks before settling on a combination of red flames encased within clear flames. It honestly looks like a fire inside the clear spectacles is causing them to melt.
The Earth sunglasses are pretty self-explanatory, and come with a cracked surface that looks like chiseled rock formations. Unlike the Fire sunglasses that have an almost sinister aesthetic (the kind you’d see on a supervillain), the Earth glasses have a stable, grounded, rectangular form factor that’s made a tad bit more interesting by the cracks in its surface.
The Water sunglasses have a bubble-like aesthetic to them, with liberal rounded edges and forms; and instead of relying only on simulations, they use a bit of AI-generated art too. The splashes inside the clear frames were made in Houdini itself, but the colors and textures on the splashes were generated using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. Rather than taking stock images, Mauriello sought to create his own, giving the glasses an added layer of uniqueness.
The Wind sunglasses too use AI-generated textures in the colored elements of the frames. The colored elements, designed to look like wisps of smoke, are trapped in a clear frame that has an aerodynamic shape, with ribs running along the front that looks like a wind-tunnel test come to life. Look inside and you see these incredible wispy forms inside, looking like the glass marbles we played with as kids. Creating this without 3D printing seems downright impossible.
Mauriello was approached by Stratasys, who let him use their J55 printers to build out designs. The J55 is the company’s high-end full-color multi-material printer that prints in ‘voxels’ instead of sliced layers. This allows the printers to meticulously build designs with multiple materials, finishes, textures, and colors all in one stretch – a feature that was integral to Mauriello’s project.
The J55 also allowed Mauriello to build out multiple samples in one stretch, giving him the ability to test out colors, finishes, and other details. Mauriello printed multiple variations of each element, looking at colors, transparency, and overall finish to help him tweak his own models. “You can experiment with a huge range of ideas and one of them is likely to be what you want,” he explained.
Once the samples were ready, Mauriello had them fitted with lenses to complete each sunglass. The glasses don’t have hinges on them, and are unibody (so they can’t be folded), but they are absolutely wearable, and Mauriello even got feedback from a pro eyewear designer on the forms and the overall design language of each elemental sunglass.
The entire project was a collaborative effort between Mauriello and Stratasys, who were kind enough to loan their state-of-the-art multi-material printers to him to showcase their overall capabilities. If you want to make designs just like these, Stratasys does offer a ‘Manufacturing On-Demand’ option that lets you generate an instant quote based on your parts. Alternatively, companies like Xometry have a global network of over 10,000 CNC manufacturers, 3D printers, molders, and other equipment that you can access, for everything from 3D printing to CNC machining and even mold-making. Envisioned to be just as easy as ordering a product online, Xometry lets you upload your model onto their Instant Quoting Engine and have the part delivered to your doorstep in a matter of days. Click here to know more!
Although it does have the word “mobile” in it, MWC has long ceased to just be about smartphones and tablets. These days, anything you can pick up and use on the go is labeled as mobile, sometimes including laptops. When it comes to portability, however, wearables have become quite the fad, and this category isn’t just limited to smartwatches or “hearables” like earbuds and hearing aids. One strong presence at MWC 2023 this year seems to be headsets and eyewear, particularly those designed for augmented and virtual reality applications. Not to be left behind, ZTE’s nubia is showcasing its first-ever AR eyewear, and it seems to be trying to be a bit more fashionable at the expense of a bit of freedom of movement.
As far as mixed reality headgear and eyewear are concerned, the trend seems to be going in the direction of cramming all the necessary hardware inside the device, unlike the first-gen Oculus Quest and HTC Vive headsets that needed to be connected to a powerful PC with a cable. A standalone headset does have tradeoffs, though, especially when you consider the weight of the hardware and the built-in battery. That’s why some devices still try to aim for a completely lightweight and comfortable design, even if it means offloading the brunt of the work to external devices.
The new ZTE nubia NeoVision Glass is one such type of device. It’s incredibly lightweight at 79g, but it’s not lacking when it comes to display quality. It boasts Micro-OLED screens with 3500 PPI and a binocular resolution of 1080p, giving the wearer the equivalent of a 120-inch screen floating before their eyes. It doesn’t skimp on the audio either, with two omnidirectional speakers and a cyclonic sound tank. All in all, it promises a full range of multimedia experiences for both your ears and your eyes.
The nubia NeoVision Glass also advertises high compatibility with a wide range of devices, including phones, computers, and consoles. It’s “plug and play,” which suggests that it doesn’t come with its own computer inside, though ZTE wasn’t exactly clear on that part. It does mean that you can use any device or platform you want, though it also means you’ll be rooted on the spot near that device unless it’s something you can carry around.
ZTE does, however, pay special attention to both the looks of the eyewear as well as its accessibility. Magnetic lenses make it trivial to swap out different sunglasses designs, and it supports zero to 500-degree myopic adjustment for those that need to wear prescription glasses. It’s still relatively bulky compared to typical sunglasses, but few will realize that you’re viewing the world through a different set of lenses, figuratively and literally.
