Everysight Maverick Sport Review: These Smart Glasses Are an Impressive Test Run
Everysight Maverick Sport glasses: The Display
To get an image in front of your eyes, major display style smart glasses like Meta Ray-Ban Displays and Even Realities G2s use Waveguide technology: Projectors throw light into special lenses with internal structures that reflect it into your eyes. The display can look great, but it requires flat glass, meaning the glasses themselves often don't look great. Everysight's glasses use its own BEAM system—a tiny projector that shoots light directly onto the lens. That means you can put any lenses you want into the frames, including prescription, as long as they're curved. Mavericks look like this on your face:
As you can see, they're dramatically raked, and they won't work with a less (extremely) angled lenses, but they look much more intentional than flat smart glasses. No one will know you have a little HUD in your eyes.
Everysight Maverick Sport glasses: Weight
There's no chip in these glasses. No camera and no speakers either. All the computation is done through apps on your iPhone or Android. Because the only technology on board is the projector and the controls, they're very light—around 43 grams, which is lighter than an average pair of sunglasses. For comparison, Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses weigh in at around 70 grams. The result is a pair of smart glasses you could easily wear all day without thinking about it. These get high marks for ergonomics and comfort.
Everysight Maverick Sport glasses: Battery life
Most display-style smart glasses make a trade-off when it comes to battery life. A full-color Waveguide display like you'll find in RayNeo Air 4 glasses is impressive, but the batteries last for about 45 minutes of heavy use. Even Realities' G1 and G2 glasses have batteries that last longer, but the display is monochrome. Everysight's technology uses a lot less power, resulting in a crisp, bright (over 1000 nits directly to the eye), color display and batteries that last for about eight hours. The Maverick's display is excellent. You can see it even in bright sunlight, and there is no light spill, so no one with you will notice weird flashes in your eyeglasses. In some ways, it's superior to waveguide lenses, but there's a catch.
Everysight Maverick Sport glasses: A single lens
The trade-off for the long battery life, bright display, and curved lenses is this: The display is only in your right eye, and it's small, with a field of view of 22 degrees, so you won't be watching movies on these things. Maverick glasses are designed for small, unobtrusive uses, applications you glance at. The G2 display glasses and RayNeos I've reviewed have similar FOVs, but those images are projected in both eyes, so it feels much larger. (I haven't tried the one-eyed Ray-Ban Display glasses yet, so I'll leave them out of the comparison.)
These glasses feature a 3D accelerometer, a 3D gyroscope, and a 3D magnetometer, so they track head movements (pitch, yaw, and roll), which means the digital display can adjust when you tilt or turn your head. So there are a lot of possibilities here, but not a lot of concrete uses.
Everysight Maverick's non-essential apps
Maverick Sport glasses connect with a small suite of downloadable apps on iPhones and Androids. The apps are a language translation app, a running and cycling app that links with Strava, turn-by-turn navigation apps for walking and driving, and a collection of mini-games. That these small programs are not all collected into one app is a definite headache. The apps themselves are a mixed bag. Here's mini-reviews of each:
E-Sport: This is the app that these glasses seem designed for. It connects with Strava, Garmin, and smart watches to provide distance, speed, routes, heart rate, and other info on your HUD. I was able to test it with Strava, and it did record my routes, just as promised. If you are very serious about your cycling or running, this provides the real-time heart rate, power use, and RPM data at a glance. Very cool.
E-Drive: The small size of the screen allows turn-by-turn driving navigation. Cool idea, but it flat doesn't work. The HUD doesn't display a map, just a contextless route, so it's easy to miss a turn. And when you do, it might update the route—or it might just stop navigating. I was never able to use it to navigate to an unknown destination.
E-Walk:This is the same idea as E-Drive, but the slower speed means you can actually use this to stroll somewhere. That's kind of cool, but glancing at your phone during a walk seems fairly effortless, and you'll get a whole map, not just your own route.
E-Arcade: A collection of mini-games, none of which are compelling.
E-Translate: Another one that just doesn't work that well. I tested it with Spanish to English using this YouTube video . It was not fast enough to make much of the conversation. I translated the same video with G2 smart glasses' translate app and Meta Ray-Bans audio-only version, and they both did fine.
Overall, while the E-Sports app is useful for granular, real-time workout info, there's nothing else here that says, "I have to have this." Unless you like golf, maybe.
I didn't include it with the main apps because it's only available as a Beta for iPhones right now, but I demoed a "coming soon" golf app for Maverick Sport and AI glasses that lets you keep score, provides GPS yardage calculations, and lets you see where the hole and hazards are, even if your view is blocked. If it works as advertised, a pair of sunglasses with this in it could be very useful for a golfer.
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