Who says hi-tech goggles with head mounted displays are made for just video games or fighter jet pilots? For us land-stuck folks, we can have their cake and eat it too with this gorgeously made Transcend GPS Alpine Goggles from Recon Zeal. The first time I saw this online, it made me think, why just for snowboarders, skiers, and other speed freaks? It has many potential applications especially for airsoft and military judging from the video of present features and future applications to be included.

Presently the Trascend GPS Goggles have two versions: the Transcend SPPX which has SPPX polarised and photochromic lens which adjust to the lighting conditions of the environment you're in; and the Transcend SPX which only has polarised lens. The pricing for the goggles are US$499 and US$399 respectively. Expensive ones indeed.

There are some features that as airsoft players, we may not necessarily need: number of runs and speed indicators. But if you're in a vehicle such as the DTV Shredder, you might need these. The lenses are wide giving you a better panaromic view of what's in front of you, and since most of the data that you will need are already are displayed in the goggles, you can focus more on the target and mission objectives without looking all over your body for that handheld GPS, time, temperature, and compass. You can download the data and use Google maps to see your progress.

This is a great feat of engineering, giving you a good looking pair of goggles that you would love to bring to any game. Though the goggles may just be too bulbous and may not allow you to properly look into the gunsights, we cannot tell until we have the chance to test this and see if it can do the job for airsoft and even real life missions.

While this is marketed to skiers, snowboarders, and those doing motocross riding, we hope that Recon-Zeal would look into the tactical applications of these goggles. The future features that they are planning to include in the Transcend Goggles are just mouth watering:

1. Post processing stats
2. Online sharing
3. Resort information overlay (for mountain resorts, but can be for skirmish site information overlay)
4. Trail maps
5. Emergency
6. Buddy Tracking (we would love it if it's team-member tracking too)
7. Mountain traffic reports (refer to no. 3)
8. Lift queues (snow sports)
9. Camera (stills and video)
10. Caller ID
11. Text/SMS
12. Soundtrack ID (how about that for music buffs?)
13. Gesture Control
14. Virtual mountain guide
15. Fly-by run preview
16. Terrain drop warnings
17. Night vision
18. G-Force indicator
19. Recon detect
20. Long term mountain stats
21. Top score
22. Treasure hunt
23. 9 Lives
24. and many more...

It's just a matter of how to keep the electronics small to be able to have all of these in one compact unit, which would not tough to do if we go by the examples of smartphones. If they can have version optimised for tactical use, then we see a lot of geardos lining up to get one of these.