Recon Jet

» see reconinstruments.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i build computer vision for drones now, so recon jet is a machine i can read from the inside. it was a small screen mounted below your right eye on a pair of sport sunglasses, feeding you speed and distance while you rode a bike. the ambition was honest. the hardware in 2015 was not ready to carry it.

recon instruments built it in vancouver, a company that had started with heads-up displays for ski goggles before moving to the bike market. intel bought recon in june 2015, the same year the jet went on sale for around 700 dollars. the reviews were mixed and stayed mixed. the screen sat off to the side of your vision, the battery ran short, the gps lagged, and the software fought you. it was a lot of money for a device that distracted you from the road it was supposed to help you read.

intel closed the recon division in the summer of 2017 as part of a broader retreat from wearables, and stopped taking orders that september. the jet did not fail because the idea was wrong. it failed because putting a computer on your face was a problem the whole industry kept losing, from google glass on down, and recon happened to be holding the bag when intel decided wearables were not its future.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was reaching for ~

the pitch was augmented reality before that phrase got heavy. not a headset, just a data layer parked at the edge of your eye so you never looked down at a bike computer again. that is a real problem, and cyclists really do crash looking at their handlebars. the jet answered it with 2015 optics and a battery that could not last a long ride.

~ the part i recognize ~

the work i do puts vision models on drones, small compute running in a rough place with a power budget that never stretches far enough. recon jet was the consumer version of that same fight, a decade earlier. i never owned one. it was a north american enthusiast gadget priced past casual buyers, and it had no turkish life at all. but i know exactly the wall it hit, because i hit a version of it most weeks.

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