What's This?
By Samantha Murphy Kelly2013-12-19 18:06:11 UTC

Google Glass lets you view emails, find directions and take calls right from the high-tech specs. But what if you wave your hand in front of a 3D projection to move around a calendar? Or if you want your eyewear to suggest meals based on the contents of your fridge?
Tech company Atheer is launching a Google Glass competitor that let you touch the digital world, shifting from passive viewing to an immersive "doing" and interacting — the ultimate vision of augmented reality. The company launched an Indiegogo campaign on Thursday as a part of an effort to bring more developers into the development process.
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Atheer's video suggested the potential in a future of wearable technology and 3D smart glasses. Watch it above; we dare you not to get excited.
"The experiences shown in the video from the user’s point of view can be available in 1-2 years," Atheer CEO Soulaiman Itani told Mashable. "Every functionality shown has been prototyped in a minimalistic way, but more with the core technology. Minimizing the hardware to be as small as in the video will probably take closer to eight years."

But other steps must come first, Itani said. Batteries must get smaller and more powerful, processes must speed up and the public must grow more comfortable with wearable technology.
"Consumers today are very smart, and very quick to adopt technology that improves their lives, but Rome wasn’t built in a day," he said. "People need time to experience Atheer, understand what an immersive computing experience really means, and understand that the benefits of the technology outweigh the costs of adoption and integration into their daily lives."
Atheer also needs developers to build more immersive apps like the ones seen in the video.
"Our team is building some apps, but like any great platform, the robustness of the ecosystem will come once we get our technology and our SDK in the hand of third party developers."
Backers of the campaign can receive the Atheer Developer Kit ($850), which comes with access to the developer portal including design guidelines, documentation, samples, support and bug tracking and reporting.
"Between now and when the hardware is ready to ship, developers can dream up ideas, build and test them in an emulated environment," Itani said. "By the time they’re ready to test on hardware, they’ll have the hardware development kit in their hands."
Donating $350 to the Atheer campaign will get you a pair of the glasses when they're ready. The current target date is December 2014.
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Image: Atheer
Topics: Apps and Software, Google Glass, Google Glass, Mobile, Small Business, Startups, Tech, Wearable Tech, wearables