What It's Like Using Telepathy One, The Google Glass Competitor Aiming To Launch This Year

Serial entrepreneur Takahito Iguchi wants us to see the world through the eyes of others.

Iguchi's dreams of enabling people to better understand each other through technology spurred the creation of Telpathy One, a sleek, wearable computing device.

Telepathy One has a built-in camera, a micro projection unit, and ear buds on either side for audio. Those ear pieces also help to keep the device in place on your head.

But the prototypes we saw last night at Telepathy's press conference in New York did not yet have the camera functionality, nor support audio.

The first app for Telepathy One is Manga Camera, a popular photo app in Japan that has amassed six million downloads.

The app turns pictures into animated comic strips, which stream to the device's virtual display via Bluetooth. In later versions of the device, you will be able to take a picture with Telepathy One and stream it to your friends whom are also wearing the headset or have the Manga Camera app on their smartphone, Telepathy Catalyst Midori Takaso tells me.

Another Telepathy One headset available for demo showed how the device could project text messages right in front of your eyes. It's a cool concept, but the screen was a bit too small and the headset didn't rest very well on my head, so I had to keep my hand on the headset at all times to keep the screen in my line of sight.

As of right now, there aren't any other applications for Telepathy One. But the company is holding an "IdeaThon" in a couple of weeks to meet with developers, and brainstorm additional ways to use Telepathy.

Telepathy is a "baby" company, Iguchi said. It launched in January and has a small team of just eight people working on the device. Even though the company is its early days, Iguchi said he's aiming to ship the device this year at a price more affordable than the developer version of Google Glass, which costs $1,500.

The caveat: "A couple of people are going to die," Iguchi joked.

Meanwhile, Google doesn't expect to release Glass to the general public until next year.