Sunglasses always seem to mysteriously walk off on their own, leaving their owners to helplessly hold up a hand to shield the sun wherever they go. Now, that all changes. Australian eyewear company Tzukuri is making sunglasses with embedded iBeacon Bluetooth Low Energy chips that will work with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to ensure that your shades never get lost again.

If you’re out and about with your sunglasses and iDevice, they pair up to wirelessly tether to one another. If you’re at home or at work, the glasses are smart enough to chill and let you go about your business. But when you’re anywhere else, the Tzukuri sunglasses will send push notifications through the app when you start to wander off without them. They alert you at 16, 32, and 50 feet if you leave somewhere without them…or if they leave somewhere without you. The idea of someone nicking them while you’re out isn’t entirely unthinkable – the glasses are quite stylish and have been scientifically designed to fit the face better than other brands.

If your sunglasses still manage to get lost or stolen, the app shows a map similar to the one used when you activate the “Find My iPhone” feature. If they’re nearby, such as somewhere in your home, the app can lead you right to them. If you’ve happened to leave them somewhere, the app shows you their last known location. The tiny embedded chip is solar powered and uses very little energy, so they should stay charged and powered on without you ever having to think about it. As an added bonus, the glasses can also let you know when you start to walk off without your iPhone. If the glasses sense your phone walking away, the phone will emit an extra-loud notification to bring you back before you abandon your phone.

The post Super-Slick Sunglasses That You’ll Never Be Able to Lose first appeared on Gajitz.

Sometimes an idea is just so elementally brilliant that you have to step back and wonder why things haven’t been done this way all along. The creative duo of designer Sayalee Kaluskar and copywriter Ramiro Ramirez came up with just such an idea: solar panel-equipped sunglasses called Shama Shades.

We wear sunglasses to protect our eyes from the sun, so they are naturally exposed to plenty of sunlight. Kaluskar and Ramirez, knowing that Ray-Ban wanted people to get more out of their sunglasses, came up with this intuitive but brilliant idea.

The sides of the sunglasses are equipped with solar panels which collect sun power all day. At night, you can take the sides off of the glasses and plug them directly into your iPhone 5 to charge it up for your busy evening of texting and Googling and whatever it is you kids do with your phones these days.

The post Cool Power: Charge Your iPhone with Solar Panel Ray-Bans first appeared on Gajitz.

We’ve known plenty of people who don’t bat an eye at dropping a couple of hundred dollars on a pair of designer sunglasses, but even those mega-expensive shades can’t do what this rather nerdy pair can do. Physicist Chris Mullin and electrical engineer Albert Titus developed these sunglasses and call them “Dynamic Eyes.” They can tell where bright spots are in your field of vision and darken those spots to cancel out the glares.

The lenses in the glasses aren’t the typical plastic – they are actually small LCD screens. Certain pixels on the screens darken according to where the tiny nose piece-embedded camera detects glares. The darkened spots move with the user’s head movements following a barely perceptible delay. When there are no bright spots in the wearer’s field of vision the Dynamic Eyes act just like any other pair of sunglasses.

Predictably, the military is interested in this awesome invention – so are the automotive, recreation and healthcare industries. It isn’t available just yet, but the prototype is amazing enough that we’re already prepared to hand over a stack of cash…but hopefully they’ll get a little more stylish with future generations.

The post Banning the Rays: Smart Sunglasses Darken Vision Glares first appeared on Gajitz.