A TINY TELESCOPE

         Wearable smart-devices represent the next stage in mobile computing and Google Glass is the most hotly-anticipated gadget in that space. It is not an extension of your Android smartphone or tablet, but is a whole new gadget in itself that can perform various day to day tasks, without you ever moving your hands. The computing headgear unveiled at a Google launch event in 2012 has created lot of excitement.

                       Look,....now instead of google glass..A tiny telescope  is used. For a group of researchers from Nokia and several universities, it would be a cylinder about the size of a tube of lipstick that you hold up to one eye only when you want to check your Twitter feed or Instagram. When you didn’t want to use it, you might wear it as a pendant or tuck it away in a pocket.

           That’s the look of a prototype they built called Loupe, so named because it bears a resemblance to the little magnifying glass that jewelers use to inspect stones. A paper on the device was presented this month at the ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in Honolulu, Hawaii.

          

          While it’s still just a research project, the Loupe presents an intriguing look at how wearable gadgets could be reimagined to make people feel comfortable trotting them out in public. It’s a challenge facing makers of wearable devices, especially head-up displays like Google Glass, which has failed to achieve mainstream appeal and is still not available as a regular consumer product.

           With the Loupe, researchers suggest, the obvious act of holding it up to your eye, rather than gazing into the distance as you would with a head-up display, makes it easier to signal to someone that you’re using it. This could make people around you more comfortable, since they know whether or not you’re paying attention to them—a common concern with devices like Google Glass.

          The Loupe prototype is three centimeters wide and eight long, with a circular hole at one end that you look into to see a small, circular floating display. Four rings of copper-colored touch electrodes encircle the device, and an actual jeweler’s loupe is included near one end for manually focusing the image.

          The device includes a proximity sensor to tell when it’s being held in front of your eye, and a magnetometer, gyroscope, and accelerometer help determine its orientation and measure changes so the display can always appear upright to the user. The current version of the Loupe is also tethered to a computer running Android and an Arduino microcontroller.