ENTERTAINMENT 2.0 By Scott Kirsner
Stuart Auerbach doesn't mind being mistaken for a cyborg in airports across the country.
On a trip last month that took the Wellesley venture capitalist to Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, and back home, Auerbach was wearing a pair of narrow, futuristic glasses with integrated headphones.
The glasses, made by MicroOptical Corp. of Westwood, enlarged the image from Auerbach's video iPod, making it seem as though he were looking at a 25-inch screen from about 6 feet away.
Auerbach may have been watching ''Master and Commander," but he looked like 'RoboCop.' His glasses, a freebie from his friend Mark Spitzer, the chief executive of MicroOptical, are part of a new wave of products designed to improve on the screens of our tiny portable devices. These next-generation displays will allow you to surf the Web on your cellphone without squinting or catch up on ''Conan" during a transcontinental flight.
For several years, MicroOptical has been trying to convince people that eyewear is much better with monitors built in. Now that the iPod can play video, company executives feel the stars are finally aligned: wearable displays + devices with small screens = major profits. But competitors aren't far behind.
MicroOptical's glasses -- the company calls them the 'Myvu Personal Media Viewer' -- have tiny liquid crystal screens built into each of the temples. (The screens are made by another Massachusetts company, Kopin Corp.)
A kind of periscope relays the image to a spot on the glasses in front of each eye, magnifying it in the process. The wearer can see what's going on above and below the glasses, and can even see through areas that aren't occupied by the image. The glasses, which cost $269, are connected to a battery pack by a thin wire (the pack holds three AAA batteries) that plugs into the iPod.