Recon Instruments’ amazing little GPS-enabled MOD display for ski goggles is some of the coolest personal tracking technology out there. The newest — the Android-based MOD Live — slickly integrates the phone in your pocket with the data in your face.
First released last year, Recon’s micro-optics displays show skiers and snowboarders slews of real-time data about their runs on a tiny little dashboard display in their googles. For all of the competitive ski-bums out there, the coolest metrics are the jump analytics, which capture information about how high, how long, and how far you jump. The MOD also captures metrics measured by other GPS-training tools like speed, altitude, time elapsed and temperature. All of this information can be loaded on to your computer via microUSB, and the data can be uploaded to the HQ online community and shared via social networks.
The new MOD Live takes all of this functionality and pairs it with your Android phone, which adds new functionality via the HQ Mobile app as well as access to many of your phone’s features. The app wirelessly transmits data about your runs to your phone so that you can relive it on the chairlift ride back to the top of the mountain. Buddy Tracker is sort of a Find My Friends for the slopes — it allows you to locate your friends on a Google Map. MOD Live also supports dashboard access to resort maps, the music on your phone, call logs, and text messages. In case the features you want aren’t available, Recon is launching an Android SDK early next year so developers can build their own tools.
Along with the new MOD Live, Recon is releasing a refreshed standard MOD with several improvements. The screen is now 33 per cent larger. While the old MOD was only available pre-installed in goggles the new ones are modular in design so that they can be installed in any “Recon Ready” pair–four manufacturers will be producing goggles this year, and Recon says that next year the “top four” manufacturers will all have Reacon Ready goggles. All of the tracking measurements are now taken by a Bluetooth remote control that you can strap to your wrist–or anywhere else really. Recon says it’ll be switching from Bluetooth to a Wi-Fi standard in the future.
Mod and Mod Live cost $US299 and $US399 respectively, which doesn’t include the goggles. They are both available now. [Recon Instruments]
