Ski Heavenly, Lake Tahoe: RideOn Ski Goggles let you communicate hands-free using audio and video, post videos and stats online for your friends back home © 2015 Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com
Imagine skiing or riding down a mountain and knowing exactly where you are on the mountain, or contacting your companions, hands free, through your ski goggles. RideOn, a startup based in Tel Aviv, recently unveiled their prototype of ski goggles that incorporate augmented reality (AR) features for the first time ever. RideOn’s see-through display (think Google Glass) projects AR layers and features as if they’re floating in the distance in front of you.
“We wanted to find our locations on a ski resort map instantly, or to quickly contact each other when we’d get separated. We wanted to do these things without having to take our gloves off, or use our phones,” said Alon Getz, CEO and co-founder, on why they created the goggles.
Software engineer and co-founder Ori Kotek noted that heads-up display goggles like Oakley Airwave and Recon’s Snow2 sort of achieved this, but with bulky external devices like wrist-pieces, and a display located in the user’s peripheral vision. “What distinguishes RideOn is our delivery of a true AR experience, derived from a see-through display that projects data onto the center of your field of view, not on the side,” he explained.
Furthermore, users interact with these data and features hands-free just by staring at friends, ski lodges, and ski lifts in the distance, or by looking up at floating buttons fixed to the sky. Getz and Kotek invented this style of UI to keep riders’ hands warm in their gloves. RideOn’s features let you:
Interact
- See your friends’ locations around you
- Communicate using audio and video
- Post videos and stats online for your friends back home
- Annoy your friends: Throw a virtual snowball
Navigate
- See your location on a map
- Find ski lodges, restaurants, and bars highlighted seamlessly in your field of vision
- Find ski lift locations & check queue wait times, and whether lifts are open
Play
- Compete against yourself and your friends in various games and improve your time and accuracy
The goggles also feature an HD camera for capturing video and for video-chatting with friends back home. RideOn uses this camera in combination with inertial sensors and GPS to measure user location and head orientation.
RideOn are the world’s first true AR goggles for skiers and snowboarders who want an enhanced, visually interactive experience on the mountain. Conceived in 2012, founders Ori Kotek and Alon Getz — each with 13 years’ experience in jet-pilot visual technology and inertial systems — created RideOn to let skiers communicate with friends, navigate the mountain’s runs and lodges, and play games, all overlaid seamlessly in the center of their vision.
RideOn is being launched as an Indiegogo crowdsourcing campaign and is be offered for $500.
For information, http://www.rideonvision.com; info@rideonvision.com for inquiries and support; sales@rideonvision.com for sales and marketing, or contact the IndieGoGo page at Igg.me@rideon.
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