Samsung still set on joining the smart eyewear club
Over the past year or so, every major company has shown some interest in building smartglasses. There’s Apple and Snap, of course, but there’s also Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Facebook. And now there’s Samsung.
A new trademark filing, first spotted by SamMobile, shows that Samsung is still working on smartglasses. The company filed for a simple logo, which looks a bit like a stylized eye, related to “computerized vision-assisting eyewear”.
Read this: The best smartglasses 2018
There are also a couple of uses linked to the new logo, including computer software for analyzing and configuring vision-assisting eyewear (hello, companion app!), computer software for setting up wearable devices, specifically headsets, display devices, and glasses (hello again, companion app!), and computerized vision-assisting eyewear that includes a camera, computer and display (hello, smartglasses!).
Of course, just because a company files a patent or a trademark doesn’t mean an actual device is around the corner. Samsung has had patents floating around for smartglasses from way back in 2014, including one for a Google Glass/HoloLens hybrid.
In that same year, Korea Times reported that Samsung was set to debut a pair of smartglasses similar to Google Glass referred to as Galaxy Glass. That, of course, never came to be.
While Samsung has been out of the consumer world of smartglasses for some time, it has been experimenting with the technology. It’s in-house C-Labs program cooked up smartglasses for the visually impaired, which we got to try out at CES 2018.
We’ll have to wait and see whether this trademark leads us to an actual consumer product or whether it’s just due diligence on the part of Samsung. Samsung has an event on 25 February, though we’d be highly surprised if we saw anything there. Still, stranger things have happened… and Samsung has been known to not be afraid of experimenting with consumer products.
All you have to do is look back at the original Samsung Galaxy Gear, or the Samsung Galaxy Edge, or the Samsung Galaxy Note, or curved OLED TVs. Samsung has a thing for these wild ideas, and as we saw with the Galaxy Gear smartwatch, it’s not afraid to be first to market.
