I was wondering about the reasoning behind including an aux jack on the glasses... The way I understand it, any form of data will be coming from the smartphone through the bluetooth connection; what then is the justification for the jack? Wouldn't our earbuds/headphones be connected to the smartphone, either through a jack in the smartphone or through bluetooth? One less bluetooth connection to worry about! No reason to connect to the spectacles... Weight saved, and space freed for something else - more battery! Or am I missing something?
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The general vision for Shima was to have a normal looking pair of glasses with built in notifications. Bone conduction tech isn't quite small enough yet to fit in with the rest of the Shima components. While there /might/ have been room on the right side, the left side would have not had any room at all due to the custom battery. The battery life wouldn't last a full day with a smaller battery, either. (Yet.) Working with the bit of space left in the right side, it was decided to add the aux jack as an additional audio option. If you're never going to use it, then it'll never be noticed if you leave the end cap in place. Any hardware changes suggested might be applied to products later down the road, but Shima isn't going to get a huge makeover this close to release.
@Josh You're quite right, of course, and I feel slightly foolish now; I was thinking of the bluetooth connection, but the connection is between the phone and the glasses, obviously, so the whole point would be to use the controls embedded in the glasses... >facepalm<
Still, it would be nice to know that one could turn off the display (to conserve battery), and still control the palyback with the regular wired controls.
The wire itself could be bundled up and stuck to your collar or even one of the arms of the glasses; anything would be better than having it dangling in front of you!
You'd probably want a unique accessory or special headphones though. There's no need for a 1m headphone cord when the aux jack is sitting on the glasses, 5cm from your ears! You would end up with a long loop of cable dangling between glasses and ears. And presumably you can use the touch panel on the glasses to control the audio: play/pause, forward/back, volume control? I imagine more of a small set of earbuds that connect to the glasses aux and either fit into your ears normally or clip onto the glasses frame on the earpiece and naturally fit into the ear canal. You'd have to work out getting the sound to the other earpiece so some kind of frame or wire that runs around the top of the glasses from right to left.... kind of why I wish they actually integrated audio into the device from the start - either through bone conduction or for a more basic option, standard earbuds attached to the frame and hard wired in. I struggle to see the value of an aux port. Audio ports, wires and Bluetooth are used to carry the sound from the device to the ear canal. You already have the device sitting right at the ear, so you have almost no distance to travel. I would be looking for some kind of minimalist earbuds or even smallness over the ear bone conduction ear pieces to tie into the device
Good news then... Excellent!
We have the same understanding.
Just to clarify... I meant using a pair of standard wired earbuds hooked up to the glasses; not to the smartphone. The idea would be to avoid the wire dangling down in front of me...
Listening to music is not major draw on the battery, its mostlt the display. You could listen to music for longer than you coulud reasonably stay awake. The controls from the earbuds would works as they would on other devices
So, these last few years I've completely ditched wired headphones, and switched to bluetooth earbuds...
I'm guessing the aux jack means I can revert to using a set of standard wired earbuds and listen to music, podcasts and audiobooks; will I be able to use the controls on the wire to pause playback or take calls as if they were directly connected to the phone? And how much would using the glasses as an intermediary for listening to music, etc. drain battery?
@Josh:
We have audio via the aux jack, that is its only purpose. When I say "standalone", I mean the device operating independently of an android or iOS device.
By standalone capability are you talking a plug in headphone/earbud addd-on or something else? It seems that the lack of audio is the biggest weakness of the design. You already have a mic - if you add speakers, ear jacks or bone conduction audio or the like you'd have a revolutionary product.
@Duusboolsen:
It is for increased versatility of the entire platform. It gives us the option (at the right time) to give the eyewear standalone capability. There may also be some cases in industrial applications where a having a smartphone may not be desired due to security concerns dealing with its camera.