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Vuzix, rather than Amazon, making augmented-reality device
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Amazon pushing its digital assistant to others’ products
Bloomberg – The first augmented-reality glasses with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant will be shown next week at CES in Las Vegas — manufactured by a 75-employee company rather than the e-commerce giant’s growing devices division.
Voice assistants and augmented-reality products will be highlighted at next week’s CES consumer electronics show. Executives from Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant will be seeking new partners and other big technology companies, including Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc.’s Oculus division, will be at the show behind the scenes as they ramp up their virtual-reality and augmented-reality products. AR is a technology that superimposes digital information such as maps, text messages and more onto a person’s view of the real world, while VR submerses a user into a completely different digitally created world.
Amazon hasn’t said whether it will release its own branded smart glasses with Alexa, but Travers expects it to happen. “I think everyone is going to come out with glasses sooner or later,” he said.
Apple is aiming to have the technology ready for its own augmented reality glasses by 2019 so that it can release a device by 2020, Bloomberg News reported last year. Oculus said it would release a $200 standalone VR headset called the Oculus Go this year that doesn’t require connectivity to a PC or smartphone. Google was an early player in the AR glasses world, launching the Google Glass prototype before pulling back and focusing on adding AR features to its Pixel smartphone and releasing an enterprise-oriented headset.
Amazon’s first Alexa device launch was the Echo voice speaker in 2014, but the company has since released speakers with screens, tablets, and TV set-top boxes.