As early as April this year, an analyst revealed that Microsoft was also developing its own smart glasses. It now seems that this might be true. According to the latest public documents, Microsoft has obtained a new patent for a head-worn device, which appears to be Microsoft's upcoming smart glasses.
This new patent from Microsoft is named "Head-mounted display device," and was applied for in the first half of 2012 but only disclosed this week. The patent description indicates that the glasses device includes gesture tracking, voice control/sound matching, eye-tracking, depth information, and facial recognition to invite or join multiplayer games.
Among the personnel listed in the patent application, two are working in the Xbox department. In fact, in June last year, before the release of the Xbox One, leaked new Xbox documents online mentioned this pair of glasses, which at the time were called Kinect Glasses. The document shows that Microsoft's glasses support Wi-Fi and 4G network connections, and have some similarities with Google's smart glasses in augmented reality technology.
According to the product roadmap revealed in the previous leaked documents, Microsoft's glasses are expected to be officially released in 2014.