Are Oakley's Airwave goggles a sign of the future?

This is all so far from the breeze-in-my-hair, sun-on-my-face experience I love about cycling.

If they put all this stuff into cars (and they're trying to), we'd all be jumping up and down complaining about driver distraction.

Zeal's Transcend GPX goggles did this a couple of years ago:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/01/recon-zeal-transcend-goggles-now-ship...

Oakley synonymous with LA and a cornflakes packet.

It took them way too long to cop to the Pharmstrong thing. Never will buy a thing of theirs.

Sign of the future? No, just a sign of the times, where people will buy any silly crap as long as it's expensive and they don't need it.

I was playing with this type of technology about 15 years ago - hardly earth-shattering.

With it being from the big-O, in the interests of their 'sponsored' athletes, does the cycle version display provide an Blood Hct too?

No, I want a proper Heads-Up Display NOW dagnammit!

I don't have a GPS because (apart from the cost) something like the Garmin 800 is a bit too bulky for me in order to provide a usable screen size. In contrast, something that painted a virtual blue line on the road in front of me avoids the screen size issue. Ditto with speed, HR data etc, a virtual 'you' that shows your PB performance on the road, or a virtual someone else that provides a riding buddy for a workout, a bit like sufferfest videos. Quite where all this should sit in the field of vision though is anybody's guess. Which would you like to obscure - potholes, overtaking traffic or traffic emerging from side roads?!

Very smart, good for skiing, but to adapt it to cycling, I don't get it, we already have high quality GPS which give us most things we need

Oakley call it 'heads up display technology'. Mind you, they also say the nose pads on their glasses are made from 'Unobtainium', they call their frame material 'O Matter', and their 'Hi-Strength Metal Injection Molded (MIM) Stainless Steel Switchlock mechanism' is actually... a catch.

They have a creative marketing department.

A pedant writes: That's not a head-up display. A HUD is a transparent display that's right in your eyeline so it appears to be overlaid on the real world. This is just a small screen in the corner of your goggles -- you still have to look away from where you're going to read it.

In fairness to Oakley, they don't appear to call it an HUD

The possibilities for idiocy that this technology unlocks are absolutely limitless.

Smart technology for skiing, for sure, but largely because when you're skiing you don't have a handy and relatively static point to fix a display, so heads-up works well. On a bike, of course, you've got your stem to stick a monitor on...