> We are Sol, a reading technology company creating tools to illuminate the mind. In an age of distraction, we're reimagining the reading experience to help you feel1Insight. Escape. Catharsis. Joy. Wisdom. Reading is so much more than a method for delivering information. It’s a technology for transforming how we experience the world and ourselves. the power of being immersed in a good book again. Discover new worlds. Revisit old ones. Uncover fresh insights and inspiration.<p>Another company I literally cannot differentiate from pure satire
It took me a while to find a through-the-lens view.<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/7iwNBeP.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://i.imgur.com/7iwNBeP.png</a>
For a first gen hardware product this looks promising. Hopefully the overall UX (and particularly the resolution of the screens) lives up to the luxe / high fashion feeling you get from the website.<p>A big, AFAIK unstated benefit of this device is the potentially positive impact on the reader's posture. Reading-oriented tasks usually place us in a head forward posture, eventually causing musculoskeletal problems (E.G. "tech neck").<p>This device frees the user to take nearly any position when reading. So at minimum it avoids contributing to poor posture, but could even be worn while the user is in therapeutic positions that lengthen the spine and stretch the front muscles of the neck and core.
An intriguing idea, but a few issues make this a very hard sell: 1) resolution is too low, 2) eInk's slow refresh time will make it look like your entire world is flashing, 3) due to the low resolution, you can only render like a paragraph worth of text; there will be a lot of page scrolling, and 4) price is too high for a one-utility device. Maybe there could be a v3 or v4 that can solve these issues.
Hey HN, I helped build the Sol Reader glasses and would love to answer any questions. It helps that I've spent months using the glasses and can attest to the increased amount of reading these glasses have unlocked. I have a 2 year old and making time for reading books is hard, but now I've found chunks of phone time being replaced with Sol time, esp. in the middle of the night when I don't want to have a light on that wakes my partner.<p>One note on the screen resolution, the screenshot linked on this thread is from our SDL2 simulator. The actual page feels more like paper, with warm eink artifacts and slight character bleed. No one who puts these glasses on talks about the resolution, instead they all have this huge smile on their face.
They should look into commercialising this technology that allows them to receive reviews by customers of a product that you can only pre-order.<p>More seriously, looking at the reviews this might be a good product for people with attention disorder? But with the sales page is styling itself like a luxury lifestyle brand, I guess they are targeting rich people with undiagnosed problems tying to self medicate?
There are a few red flags for me here:<p>1. I can't find any information on the website about the company itself, where it is located, or who runs it.<p>2. The testimonials are described as being from "early Sol Reader customers," but I don't think they've shipped any of these yet, so without anything more specific than "Dave B" or "Maya S" these at least seem fake.<p>3. The images of the device look like renderings rather than actual images of the hardware.
When I complain about current e-ink book replacements, the problems are the ways in which it fails to act like a real book. For example, it's still slow/awkward to jump back and forth between different pages, e.g. when a definition in a list 20 pages back is important for understanding some piece of reasoning. But for something like this, the tiny amount of text visible at a time would make things far worse!
Why on earth would you need e-ink in an environment where you have full control over the light?<p>Just use a normal display and set it to the brightness you like. More even illumination, no flickering when the outside light changes. If you really want to: put a photo sensor or two on the outside, smooth the f* out of them and use that to dim up or down a bit.
Since this is just for books , why does it need to be "VR"?<p>Couldn't you use a single e-ink screen and project/reflect the results onto areas in front on both eyes?<p>I'm not sure this will work out , but it is nice you tried.
Their website is broken for me. All that's displayed:<p>> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
Honestly reading a book in a bath tub is really relaxing for me, but is a pain to hold the book above the water. So I see value here. But the marketing images look hilarious. Showing "models" looking in the distance with these things on looks like a joke. Showing a middle aged guy with these on sitting in a chair makes more sense to me.
I get the idea, but the execution is.. here is metaphor, it is like building and selling people bicycles and bike lanes to travel across continental US while on the other side of planet people building and taking Maglev trains.<p>This is like trying to sell me Nokia Symbian with Opera Mobile instead of iPhone 15 to browse web in year 2024.<p>Apple Vision Hypetrain.
Is this healthy for eyes? I thought such a close focusing distance for long term wear would be quite bad?<p>I can sort of understand this format for movies enabling larger than screen interface during flying etc. But not sure whats the point for reading - having something like kinlde seems way more convinient.
This looks really intriguing, although I don't think I could justify spending $350. I assume the cost is primarily due to the relatively high resolution e-ink displays that are probably necessary to represent characters at the necessary scale.
I'm not entirely sure what the use-case is. Is the visual isolation from the environment a central feature? What makes this a better reading experience than an e-paper Kindle?