Zeal Optics Transcend GPS goggles
The ultimate in cyber ski-wear?
Review Being more a mountaineer than a skier I tend to the view that snowboarders and their ilk are a pretty self-obsessed bunch. Winter-sports eyewear maker Zeal appears to take a similar view, given its new Transcend goggles have GPS built-in to let snowboarders and skiers show anyone who is interested where they have been and how fast they got there.
Sloping off: Zeal Optics Transcend
Leaving the GPS tech aside for a moment the Transcends are a more than decent pair of snow goggles. The polarised lenses are perfectly tinted, the fit is snug yet comfortable and the elastic strap has plenty of adjustment. The goggles also have an anti-fog coating and are fully helmet compatible.
It's just as well the fit is snug because you need to wear the goggles tight to keep the little LCD screen that sits in the bottom left corner of the right hand eyepiece in view. Once you have got that sorted the 240 x 320 screen is easy to read when you look down at it but not distracting when you are watching out for obstacles on the hill.
Indeed, that may come as a disappointment to anyone expecting to ape Robert Downey Jnr. and become some sort of Iron Man character, as sadly, the data readouts within the googles don’t appear as an HUD.
Inside the goggles nestles an LCD showing a range of information
Menu selection and navigation are managed with three rubber coated buttons on the right hand side. These are large enough with sufficient space apart to be easily used with gloves on. The menus are simple too – I managed to swap from kph to mph in a few minutes without recourse to the user guide.
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COMMENTS
Ideal for long distance cross-country skiers
Cross country skiers will find these useful, particularly the hardy souls who don't follow the beaten trail,
Might even prove useful for Canadians living in the north when they check their trap lines.
Navigation
Does it have any form of waypoint storage so you can use it to guide you around a large ski resort, or even point you to civilisation?
Memories of a complete white out, followed by about three hours stumbling down the wrong bit of the hill to the bar are coming back to haunt me, if only because being the wrong bit of hill the bar wasn't there...
And wingsuiting skydivers also
http://twitpic.com/3e06a2
+1
Nice idea, but as said above just WAY too expensive for the abuse and short lifespan of most ski goggles. And frankly, at THAT price I don't want "an anti-fog coating", I want dual-pane sealed lenses like Uvex and Oakley offer that are FOG-FREE (almost). I can put up with single-pane coated lenses in a set of Bolles at £55, but NOT at that price. (And at that price, I want my Vermillion lenses, not junky orange!)
@JaitcH
Maybe not, bcos as I read the article they only record your position and don't actually tell you where you are.
@Laird, ultralights don't have much instrumentation, but what they have is essential. Gliders need a vario to say whether you're going up or down, and GPS isn't sensitive enough to track up/down accurately. And all aircraft need an altimeter which *always* works off air pressure so using a GPS could result in you sharing airspace with a 747 on approach. Powered aircraft may want to know speed too, but that's *always* airspeed, so again a GPS ain't much use.
