(Photo: Pexels/Francis Seura)
Smart binoculars will soon hit the market, but Unistellar, an award-winning company manufacturing intelligent telescopes, is crowdfunding them now.
Unistellar Working On Smart Binoculars ENVISION
Unistellar is revolutionizing binoculars with its upcoming product -- Envision! Unlike Swarovski's Optik AX Visio binoculars, unveiled earlier this year, Unistellar's new Envision binoculars offer smart capabilities.
Envision will employ augmented reality (AR) to recognize and classify over a million unique features, including mountains, trails, and more than 200,000 objects in the night sky, rather than just identifying birds and animals. The smart binoculars will automatically detect and take pictures of celestial bodies like planets and stars.
This technology is currently being packed into a set of binoculars with Nikon 50mm lenses, enhanced with an augmented reality projection system that superimposes real-time contextual data on top of the image being watched.
It is also packed with smart functionalities. One useful feature is its ability to function as a mobile tour guide—one user can lock onto an object and then pass the binoculars to another user, who will see directional indicators pointing them to the same destination. Sharing the thing that captures your attention during stargazing has never been as easy as this.
Envision binoculars use the device's GPS and other sensors to pinpoint the user's location. They also come with downloadable offline maps, which helps when traveling to areas with poor connectivity. The smartphone also feeds information to the binoculars through an app from an online database that features "millions of cartographic items, including mountains, hills, trails, landmarks, water sources, stars, galaxies, and other celestial objects."
The Envision's battery life is rated for five hours of operation or "1,000 binocular engagements per charge," although it will still work as ordinary binoculars afterward.
Unistellar is using a crowdsourced Kickstarter campaign, which is currently more than $1 million short of its financing target, to bring the Envision binoculars to consumers. Although delivery for the first backers isn't anticipated until November 2025, early bird backers can preorder a pair for $699, a big savings over the anticipated $1,199 retail pricing. It is significantly cheaper than the $4,799 Swarovski smart binoculars.
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Envision Specs
Envision has ten times magnification power with a 50 mm diameter. It offers users over 1,000 astronomical targets of interest and over 1 million terrestrial targets.
The anticipated binoculars will give you a new view of stars, comets, galaxies, planets, and nebulae. Plus, their AR capabilities enrich the optical field of view with a wealth of data.
Envision allows one to see the world as a local outdoor guide during the day. At night, it lets stargazing enthusiasts explore the cosmos like an experienced astronomer.
It comes with user-friendly technology and users can switch to different modes to discover new dimensions during their exploration.
Here are the complete specs of the product:
- Magnification power: x10
- Diameter: 50mm
- Architecture: Porro
- AR Battery life: 5h or 1000 binocular engagements per charge
- Envision binoculars operate without a battery as classic binoculars. The battery is required only for the augmented reality display.
- Field of view: 6°
- Exit pupil diameter: 5mm
- Optical glass: BAC4 Fully Multicoated.
- Astronomical targets of interest: 1,000+ star clusters, nebulae, galaxies, comets, asterisms and more
- Number of visible stars: 200,000
- Number of terrestrial targets: +1 million hills, mountains, and peaks. Hundreds of thousands of ways, shelters, water springs, caves, and more.
- Weight: 1.2 kg 2.65 lbs
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