OLED data glasses put Internet in your face

If you thought there were enough menaces on the road with people yakking away on Bluetooth headsets and texting while driving, these concept OLED data glasses just upped the ante.

Just imagine if this little invention -- from the wonderfully Teutonic sounding Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems -- were to hit mainstream use. We'd have a global epidemic of distracted users plugged into their eyewear, busily accessing the day's news, emails, IMs and Twitter on their glasses, barely paying attention to where they're going.

Still, there's no halting technology. Looking on the bright side, this interactive eyewear does provide a far more natural alternative to head-mounted displays. The glasses throw the image on to the retina via an OLED micro-display, so it appears a metre in front of the wearer. And instead of getting a static image, an eye-tracking device fitted to the hinge lets you scroll through information by simply moving your eyeball, leaving you essentially hands-free.

Fraunhofer's Dr Michael Scholles believes the glasses already have ready-made applications in the medical and construction fields, and will open up all sorts of services for people with severe disabilities.