It seems to be an incredibly heavy site at least on my work computer, locks up the browser on scrolling the pages and severe latency on clicking actions.
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.
Agreed. I think this looks like a lot of fun and could make reading during long flights a lot more comfortable, but $350 on a pre-order is a little steep for me. I can't imagine getting nearly enough utility out of this to justify that price. Maybe there's a category of person for which this is a hit.
I missed the specs and seeing that I would tend to agree. This seems rather disappointing. I'd certainly be curious to see what it looks like hovering so close to your eyes.
Working on more, but nothing exists off-the-shelf for >300ppi eink. No one has ever done eink under magnification like this so higher density screens don't exist (yet). We made a custom bitmap font system and font to squeeze every bit of optimization out of this screen that we can. Text rendering isn't pristine at this low res but it's good enough to not hinder reading. https://x.com/johnboiles/status/1715136868290081104?s=20
Yeah, at this res and price, they shouldn't be showing you a page. They should be eye tracking and showing you the a line or two of text at a time so that it's much cleaner.
I have actually made a pi powered eReader with a 2.7 inch eink screen with Python. I could pretty easily swap the code over to work with the 1.3 inch screens they use here.
They should look into commercialising this technology that allows them to receive reviews by customers of a product that you can only pre-order.
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?
> 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.
Another company I literally cannot differentiate from pure satire
What's crazy is that I think something like this would be super cool, but the website and marketing copy actually turn me off from this execution of the idea.
I will look for another company to do this, just based on what I see here. Unless the reviews show that the product supersedes this presentation.
> "Discover new worlds. Revisit old ones. Uncover fresh insights and inspiration."
... Forge meaningful connections. Ignite your creativity. Elevate your perspective. Redefine your limits. Embrace change. Keep exploring, within and without.
See, it's trivially easy to spout meaningless drivel with the aid of a LLM.
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.
I don't think the eink will make it look like the world is flashing, because I'm guessing the text is fixed in one place, moving with you when you turn your head.
which is also not great for entirely different reasons
It won't look like the world is flashing, because eInk just doesn't work that way anymore. Any modern eInk display can go many page turns without a full-screen refresh. IIRC Kobos, Nooks, and Kindles come preconfigured to only refresh on chapter breaks.
Good points, but I'd quibble about the price being too high for a single use device. There is a segment of the population that spends a lot of time reading and they don't mind spending money for a device that provides a good reading experience. The original Kindle cost $399 back in 2007 and sold out in hours. The high-end Kindle still costs $250.
Is this healthy for eyes? I thought such a close focusing distance for long term wear would be quite bad?
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.
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.
Probably not, it's statically projecting (with fancy optics) an eink page out in front of your face. There's no 3d tracking / fast refresh or anything like that. Imagine something that mounts an ebook a meter out from your face, but in a small package.
I wouldn't think so. VR motion sickness is caused by "seeing" yourself moving in the VR space in a way that doesn't match what your body is doing. That is why a lot of VR games either keep you in one place (beat saber, space pirate trainer) or rely on instaneously "transporting" you around the world (steam lab, ms mixed reality). Games where you move yourself around using the thumbstick just like you would in a regular FPS tend to make people who are susceptible to it feel motion sickness. The other culprit is lag or drift in the headset image when you look around, which makes the world appear to be spinning.
All that being said, I don't believe that anything they are doing will create that first-person appearance of movement, so it shouldn't make you feel motion-sick unless you are using it in a car.
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.
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").
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.
I can only speak for myself - I like reading while lying down (and holding a Kindle in front of my face), and my arm does get tired, but even in bed I don't think I would sacrifice awareness of my surroundings for slightly more comfort.
You can see around the lenses and have decent awareness of what’s going on. I can see my partner and interact with her on the edges. I can also drink tea and see where everything is. It’s nowhere near complete isolation.
I can definitely see a use case. Reading while lying down, in the bath (okay, that's lying down again), on an airplane, when it's so cold out your hands freeze, etc.
I don't think it's a product for me, but I think there's at least a small market for it.
Absolutely. I read before going to sleep every night. Back in the day, I'd often wake up in the middle of the night with the bedside lamp still on. Now I use a Kindle that turns itself off after a while (I have an iPad too, but iPads hurt when you go to sleep and they bonk you in the face), but it's still not entirely comfortable to use for that purpose.
If the glasses were comfortable enough to not disturb sleep, and durable enough that you didn't have to worry about shattering the eInk display if you rolled over on them, I would definitely be interested.
> If the glasses were comfortable enough to not disturb sleep
To that end, maybe a goggles setup with separate lenses, with comfy elastic bands rather than a rigid glasses frame. That might require some ingenuity... I notice the frames are pretty thick, suggesting there's some electronics (or more likely, batteries) inside.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
> Is the system able to adjust to the strength of your eyesight?
There is a per-eye diopter adjustment, ranging from 0 to -5.75, so you have quite a bit of focal adjustment.
> What are the advantages of the Sol Reader over paper books and other e-paper readers?
Not having to hold a book is huge, IMO. I didn't realize it until I started wearing my Sol Reader regularly, but it's basically as much work as watching TV while capturing the words of a book.
Also, the lack of light output means I can read in the middle of the night. There's dark mode and an ambient light sensor for auto-adjusting brightness.
So far the boot loader is unlocked and you can flash on top of it, although I don’t know why you’d want to since you’d have to rebuild an entire OS but it would be possible. Our waveforms were easy to get right so it’s not as simple as driving the eink displays with OSS drivers.
To add a book you can use a mobile app or text directly since we’re manually buying the books for now. Once we have a book marketplace it’ll be self serve on the mobile apps. We are planning side loading capabilities so you can use the mass storage device, but there’s a bit of preprocessing we’re doing to the epubs that we’ll have to replicate for self serve epubs. To get around that you can email an epub to add@solreader.com and we deliver it directly to your device. Handy!
The lenses that ship with these limited editions will be dust and moisture resistant. But if they drop in a tub all bets are off. That may change one day.
99 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] thread> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
https://i.imgur.com/7iwNBeP.png
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/378227457750466574/...
- Interpupillary Distance (IPD) adjustment range of 58 to 72mm
- E Ink 1.3” displays
- 256x256 per eye resolution
- Side-lit with 3000K LEDs
- Circular polarizers and transflective films
https://solreader.com/technical-specs
The new oculus meta quest 3 could do this and the price difference while nearly double isn't huge if someone really as 350 spare to spend on this.
And the oculus would have headphones, this doens't?
I don't think this kind of resolution is sufficient for VR.
And no, I suck at doing write ups on my projects so I don’t have one lol. But here is the write up someone else did when they saw my post on Reddit. https://www.hackster.io/news/diy-e-reader-incorporates-mecha...
For those who want to see more lens shots, you can scroll to "Product Specs" and click the 2nd tab "Navigation".
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?
Another company I literally cannot differentiate from pure satire
I will look for another company to do this, just based on what I see here. Unless the reviews show that the product supersedes this presentation.
... Forge meaningful connections. Ignite your creativity. Elevate your perspective. Redefine your limits. Embrace change. Keep exploring, within and without.
See, it's trivially easy to spout meaningless drivel with the aid of a LLM.
which is also not great for entirely different reasons
> moving with you when you turn your head
As in, unlike vr it doesn't stay in place- much dumber tech. just Kindle on your face
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.
Also don't confuse focal distance with real distance. We can potentially have a very close lens focused as if we are looking at an infinite distance.
FPS games are so bad that I have never even considered VR.
All that being said, I don't believe that anything they are doing will create that first-person appearance of movement, so it shouldn't make you feel motion-sick unless you are using it in a car.
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").
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.
This is the alternative right now: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/best-kindle-accessor...
I don't think it's a product for me, but I think there's at least a small market for it.
Absolutely. I read before going to sleep every night. Back in the day, I'd often wake up in the middle of the night with the bedside lamp still on. Now I use a Kindle that turns itself off after a while (I have an iPad too, but iPads hurt when you go to sleep and they bonk you in the face), but it's still not entirely comfortable to use for that purpose.
If the glasses were comfortable enough to not disturb sleep, and durable enough that you didn't have to worry about shattering the eInk display if you rolled over on them, I would definitely be interested.
To that end, maybe a goggles setup with separate lenses, with comfy elastic bands rather than a rigid glasses frame. That might require some ingenuity... I notice the frames are pretty thick, suggesting there's some electronics (or more likely, batteries) inside.
lol okay
Huh?
> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
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.
Reading by reflected light from an eInk screen is far more comfortable, at least for me.
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.
There is a per-eye diopter adjustment, ranging from 0 to -5.75, so you have quite a bit of focal adjustment.
> What are the advantages of the Sol Reader over paper books and other e-paper readers?
Not having to hold a book is huge, IMO. I didn't realize it until I started wearing my Sol Reader regularly, but it's basically as much work as watching TV while capturing the words of a book.
Also, the lack of light output means I can read in the middle of the night. There's dark mode and an ambient light sensor for auto-adjusting brightness.
Is it sweat/water resistant?
To add a book you can use a mobile app or text directly since we’re manually buying the books for now. Once we have a book marketplace it’ll be self serve on the mobile apps. We are planning side loading capabilities so you can use the mass storage device, but there’s a bit of preprocessing we’re doing to the epubs that we’ll have to replicate for self serve epubs. To get around that you can email an epub to add@solreader.com and we deliver it directly to your device. Handy!
The lenses that ship with these limited editions will be dust and moisture resistant. But if they drop in a tub all bets are off. That may change one day.
Couldn't you use a single e-ink screen and project/reflect the results onto areas in front on both eyes?
I'm not sure this will work out , but it is nice you tried.
1. No more neck strain.
2. No more eye strain.
3. No more arm strain.
4. No more context switching strain.
5. No more distraction strain. (My Solreader is on? Do not disturb).
A truly strain free experience!
Also no glasses/contacts if your vision prescription isn't too intense.