Biking's been part of my life in a very substantial way since my now-ex-wife got me a bike for my 32nd birthday, just a few days under 10 years ago. It's lost me hundreds of pounds, carried me thousands of miles, in many cities.

So when, sitting in a brewery tasting room on a Saturday morning in June 2013 in Columbus (and having arrived by bike) I saw a preorder for bike goggles with a Google Glass vibe, a smart HUD, it took only a few minutes of hemming and hawing before I pulled the trigger.

Fast forward to Wednesday, when I was finally able to go by a FedEx Office a couple blocks from my wife's office and collect a package, before rushing out the door to a bus - alas it was raining and I didn't want to get my bike, or myself(!) drenched.

The Jet arrived in a box with a heavy, canvas-faced but stiff round bag inside. It's the sort of thing that could pass as a purse if you had a strap on it. Inside, the goggles, with their sunglass lens preinstalled, rested in cutout foam. There's also a spare battery, a clear lens, and a USB to microUSB cable for charging. A small tab must be pulled out before the battery makes contact, and the charge it shipped with was pretty much depleted, so it wasn't until later in the evening that I was able to play with it.

It needs to be connected to a computer with Recon's "Uplink" software installed. Uplink will update the firmware on it - apparently a new version came out between when it left the factory and when I got it - and you are walked through the setup, including telling it where you will ride so it can pre-seed the device with maps. You also link a smartphone to it: it can display notifications from the phone (currently SMS and incoming call, but there's an API) and will fetch maps via the phone.

The display can be moved around inside the HUD (it's a small physical display, not a prism like Glass) to be in your field of vision where it needs to be, and there's also the ability to use what they call glance detection to blank the display when you aren't focused on it, probably by detecting positions of the whites of your eyes.

Control is via a small touchpad on the earpiece and a switch which can be pushed forward (select) or backward (back); typing via the onscreen keyboard, which is needed for things like entering wifi passwords if you can't use WPS, is cumbersome.

It has a built-in 1.2MP camera which can do stills or short videos, but which is currently not readable on the phone, you have to sync back to your computer.

The workout tracking can be customized to show speed, distance, heading, etc, and if you pair it with a heart rate belt, it will show that too. My belt went missing somewhere at home like the day before it came so I haven't tried that yet.

I wore it Saturday for the usual charity ride we have where several hundred of us chase a few kegs of beer hauled on bike trailers, then share a pint at the end, and a number of folks asked about it, most people that I know but a few strangers. It's a very cyberpunk looking device.

For $500 (which was what I paid) it seems worth it tho it's gonna need some more apps before it really pays off. I hope to find some time in the upcoming weeks to actually start experimenting with programming for it.