Oakley’s new HUD goggle looks good for bombing tanks, is good for bombing mountains

Thanks to Oakley’s Airwave 1.5 goggle skiers and snowboards won’t have to wonder how fast they’re going, which way they’re headed, or where their friends are the next time they’re bombing down a Colorado mountainside. The Airwave 1.5 will beam all that info – and quite a bit more – onto the inside of the goggle lens with a heads up display (HUD) powered by Recon.

Aside from being a top-of-the line Oakley goggle (with interchangable anti-fog lenses) the Airwave 1.5 comes loaded with tech features. It has GPS, Wi-Fi, thermometer, and MFi Bluetooth built in, allowing the goggles to display speed, location details, temperature data, and – for the truly rad – the Airwave 1.5 will even measure height, distance, and hang time off jumps. There’s also a “Buddy Tracking” function that shows friends who have opted in where everyone in the crew is on the mountain, and the HUD comes pre-loaded with over 600 resort maps. The common concern that it might be awkward to have a computer display worth of info shoved into your eyeholes is alleviated by positioning the data at a resolution that appears to the eye like a 14-inch monitor from five feet away.

There’s more to the Airwave 1.5 than just the HUD, though. All those metrics on your face can blasted to world via social media when the goggle is paired to Oakley’s free Airwave app, which also tracks progress toward goals like total vertical over a day of riding. The goggles also come with a small remote that allows users to interact with the data on the HUD and return phone calls or navigate music playlists without having to shed gloves and dig through winter layers to retrieve the phone itself.

This does beg the question: won’t all this type-A data tech somehow sully the beauty and solitude of gliding through a natural winter wonderland? Probably, but who has time to worry about the view when there are airtime records to be set and brag data to be tagged and posted to Facebook? No one, that’s who.

All this function does not come cheap, however. The Airwave 1.5 costs $649.99 and is available now in Oakley O-Stores stores and on Apple.com.