TECH – Oakley Airwave 1.5 Goggles

Skiing is awesome. However, the bit of equipment that TGJ has always had a love/hate relationship with are the boots. We recently got ourselves a new red pair. The reason for us doing this was not for stupid and irrelevant things such as comfort or whether they fitted. No, we focused in on the important things such as the fact that we thought we would look a tiny bit like Iron Man when we put them on. Let’s be honest here gentlemen. The boots do look like they belong on a very cool bit of armor.

The very satisfying noise they make on the wooden floors of bars is also very cool. They also keep your ankles safe(ish) when you fall over on a night out. BUT there is an issue with our new boots and we admit that, with hindsight, we made a mistake. It began when we saw this pair of goggles and suddenly out red Iron Man boots became the silly childish things they actually were. Because we realised that we had got Robert Downey Jr.’ s boots at the expense of getting the awesome helmet. Honestly, the only thing that these goggles are missing is a direct link to Alfred the Butler from Batman. ‘Would Sir like his 4 o’clock Jaegerbomb brought up from the bar or would he prefer it with breakfast?’

Let’s run through what these goggles provide: There is the speedometer which measures how fast you were going before you crashed. There is the ‘Altitude-o-meter’ which allows you to calculate how fast you can get drunk at various establishments. These are situated in the bottom right of the goggles so they don’t interfere with your vision. You can even do contrast the speed you get on different runs. There is the skiing equivalent of sat-nav and a handy ‘find your friend’ thing (called ‘buddy tracking’ which make it sound a bit like an ‘off-piste’ version of Grindr) which will allow your mates to locate and pick you out of the tree you hit. There is also music, telephone and a locking system on the lens which allows you to switch to different UV blocking lenses (also makes you look like an extra in the new Start Wars film). All of which is about as cool as the environment you will use it in. In short; screw the boots, get the goggles!

By Edward Hambro Rabben