Instaglasses (credit: Markus Gerke)
Filters (credit: Markus Gerke)
Controls (credit: Markus Gerke)
Box (credit: Markus Gerke)
Instagram has become one of the most popular applications worldwide with tens of millions of users worldwide. Now a German designer came out with a concept that will bring all those filters right in front of your eyes.
German Designer Markus Gerke recently came up with a simple yet fetching design he called Instaglasses or in other words a pair of glasses with the capability to take pictures and instantaneously add filters to them and upload them to the web.
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The general usage is supposedly simple – look at anything you would like to shoot, snap a picture by pressing a tiny bottom on the glasses and by pressing a different bottom apply a filter or change it using a tiny scroll wheel on the side of the glasses.
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Sound simple enough right? well not exactly. As ingenious as the Gerke’s design for the Instaglasses is, there are at least a number of serious obstacles before you can start snapping those instagram images from your own set of Instaglasses. Probably the most serious one has to do with the display.
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If you want the option to snap a picture and watch it from the glasses themselves (instead of say sending them to your phone and play with them over there), you will need your glasses to be able to have some type of see-through display. This kind of technology is still very rare (Samsung showcased a prototype see-through OLED display back in 2010 but as far as we know it did not get into any product on the market as of yet). There are other options for adding a display to glasses – Google is working on the Glass project and the Israeli company Lumus is said to be bringing its own solution to the market next year. All of these are proprietary solutions which are fairly complex and are far from being the simple one purpose tool needed for the a product such as the Instaglasses.
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Even if you somehow solve the display issue, you are still left with other problems including packing WIFI or even 3G into the tiny glasses frame as well as a battery that can last for at least a day of usage – certainly not a simple task.
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Gerke already stated that he is not going to attempt to commercialize his design (not surprising given all the hurdles we just mentioned). One the other hand a group of 3 other designers are claiming that they are working on something similar (no real details are available at this point but you can enter your e-mail on the following site and get info when this will be available).
