Last week, Apple revealed what could potentially be the future of smart wearables with its $US3,500 Vision Pro headset, but you can’t buy one just yet. What you can buy, or at least, pre-order, is a pair of goggles that take an entirely different approach to immersive entertainment, letting users block out everything but the written word, and only for 4350.
The Sol Reader had a low-key reveal at CES 2023 earlier this year, with just a handful of people getting the opportunity to try out the unique hardware that seems to be the antithesis of wearable devices like the Meta Quest 3 or the Apple Vision Pro. It’s still designed to be worn like a pair of oversized glasses, but instead of positioning a pair of high-resolution, full-colour screens in front of the user’s eyes, the Sol Reader features a pair of 1.3-inch side-lit E Ink displays, each capable of displaying 65,536 pixels. The screens blot out any forward vision.
For comparison, Apple says the Vision Pro headset has around 23 million pixels across its internal displays, which means that when using the Sol Reader, users are not going to see beautifully anti-aliased text in the font of their choice. Instead, it will look more like the above image shared on the Sol Reader’s pre-order page, with ebooks and other text files displayed like they would have been on an ‘80s PC. How the Sol Reader handles e-books with imagery remains to be seen, but it probably won’t be pretty.
The Sol Reader’s other specs aren’t mind-blowing, but they don’t need to be. It’s powered by a 240MHz dual-core processor and 8MB of RAM, and while storage is limited to a paltry 64MB, the headset wirelessly connects to a mobile iOS or Android app that allows DRM-free EPUB files to be copied over, so you don’t need to keep your entire collection on the Sol Reader.
Navigating ebooks is handled by an ergonomic wireless remote which means the Sol Reader weighs just 104 grams, even with a built-in rechargeable battery good for about 25 hours of reading. So the glasses should be very comfortable to wear for prolonged periods, although it’s hard to say how long a user’s eyes will be comfortable staring at page after page of jagged, aliased text.
The Sol Reader’s $US350 price tag, while considerably cheaper than the $US3,500 Apple Vision Pro, is still going to be hard for many users to justify, even if they’re devoted readers. That’s even pricier than high-end e-readers like the $400 Amazon Kindle Oasis, which displays text at a crisp 300PPI, or full-colour VR headsets like the Meta Quest 2, which recently saw another price drop to $509.99.
All those concerns could be moot, anyways, because while the Sol Reader is listed as being available for pre-order, you need to enter a special code to do so. If you don’t already have one, you’ll have to join a waitlist and be patient for a little longer.