text: Japanese entrepreneur Takahito Iguchi thinks Google Glasses are not cool. He may be right. There’s already a website with pictures of people wearing them – the people look ridiculous or smug or, more often, both. If you search Google Images for Google Glasses, one of the first pictures is of a large, naked man wearing them in the shower. Iguchi hopes that this is Google’s weak point. He has designed some glasses that are a bit more stylish and a bit more Japanese. 
  Iguchi’s glasses aren’t really glasses – they are a piece of metal with a camera and a very small projector. The glasses are called Telepathy One. Since he first presented them to the public in Texas, they have attracted $5 million from investors. Like Glass, you will be able to buy Telepathy One in 2014. 
  It’s a more simple version of Google Glass. Glass has many uses – you can surf the internet, read emails, take photographs – but Telepathy will be “more of a communication machine”. Connected to your phone, it will allow real-time visual and audio sharing. You’ll be able to post photos and videos of what you see on Facebook or send them as an email. Or see and speak to a video image of a friend. 
  “It will help bring you close to your friends and family. We are very focused on the communication and sharing possibilities,” says Iguchi, who has worked in the Japanese technology industry for 20 years. “I’m a visionary,” he says. “I have a dream that people will understand other people. When I go to London, I am a stranger. But I believe that everyone wants people to understand them and to understand other people. And, with the glasses, you can know more information about people before you even speak to them.” 
  When Iguchi was growing up, Japanese technology ruled the world: they had the Sony Walkman, which was as popular as the iPhone. Now, to compete, he has had to leave Tokyo and go to Silicon Valley. “Tokyo is very rich in fashion and culture, but it’s still an island. It’s isolated. There is no way to expand. But, in Silicon Valley, everyone is from everywhere. It’s where you come to connect with the world.” They will make the glasses in Japan and the software in the US. 
  It was easy to build the prototype of Telepathy One, Iguchi says. “We have every sort of technology in Tokyo. The problem is presenting it to the world.” The top manufacturers all want to work with him, he says, because they have the technology, they just find it difficult to sell it. “There needs to be a story to the product. Apple had a story with the iPod – 1,000 songs in your pocket. And Steve Jobs was inspired by Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, and he inspired me, so maybe it will come in a circle.” 
  Like Steve Jobs, Iguchi is a confident man, but his strong Japanese accent makes it difficult to understand him. It is possible that this fact helped him to find the idea for Telepathy One. When he visited London, he stayed with someone he didn’t know. “He was not my friend, but I talked with him for three hours, and now he is my friend. That is how long it takes to understand each other, to share our feelings, and background, and career. Maybe Telepathy makes that quicker. If you are getting information from the cloud and social networks, that will happen more easily.” 
  Iguchi hopes that Telepathy One will help people see other people’s point of view. 
  As a student, he explains, he studied philosophy during the day and taught himself how to code at night. “And, one day, I opened the door of my apartment and I suddenly realized that everything is code. Everything is coded and can be shared between humans. And everything can be encoded and decoded. And, if code can be exchanged between humans, that will end all war.”