I don't think you meant literally replace your computer, but it couldn't do that under the best of circumstances since it still requires a specific model of Garmin computer to aggregate the sensor data and pipe it to the glasses presumably over bluetooth.

The biggest struggle with devices of this type is probably battery life, you can only strap so big of a battery to the side of your head before people will simply not tolerate the weight. Recon tried to compensate for this by giving you two batteries with the intention that you'd just hot swap it during a longer ride. Garmin's take appears to be based on offloading as much processing as they can to your existing head unit and keeping the display as lightweight (physically and from a SW perspective) as possible to maximize battery life.

This would also explain why it's limited in compatibility to their latest and generally most powerful head units as it needs to piggyback off of their processors and batteries to a certain extent.

So then thinking this through... Given current design limitations why wouldn't you just move everything to the helmet?

Guessing the mounting compatibility issues would be greater. Much easier to mount to the side of a sunglasses frame which are pretty standard and may require a few different sized rubber bands than trying to mount to all different types of road or aero helmets. Some of which may or may not have vents. Also much easier to get a snug fit of the display when it's mounted to the sunglasses frame, rather than have the display mounted to the helmet and forcing your sunglasses to rest up against it.

That is essentially what Daqri has done in the industrial sector: http://hardware.daqri.com/smarthelmet

The reason Glass flopped is because the technology really isn't there yet to do what we feel these devices ought to be capable of. Batteries are probably the biggest culprit in all of this as they are inherently governed by the laws of physics rather than moore's law so we see marginal gains rather than exponential.

By accepting these limitations we can create products today that live up to the consumer expectations in terms of capabilities but at the expense of conceding that the form factor will not be a "discrete" wearable but rather something that favors function over form. Daqri and Hololens come to mind.

While it would be possible to do the same thing with a bike helmet I just don't think the market for it would justify the design costs. Designing a good helmet is already difficult enough and you will immediately alienate some large segment of the market in the process of balancing weight versus ventilation versus aero. Assuming you get it right, you'll then have to battle the sticker shock as your msrp now has to account for helmet + display costs.

Considering the skepticism that many already have for these kinds of products, e.g. "a solution in need of a problem", you'd really have to deliver on the user experience in order to justify higher costs.

edit: You probably were talking about just mounting it on a helmet rather than integrating it in a helmet. It's a possibility but the compatibility and/or general clumsiness of it would probably outweigh the marginal gains.

Looks pretty cool

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That's odd. In 20 or so years I can't think of one crash I blame on someone looking at their computer.

Edit: And I'll add a heads-up display doesn't "solve" the attention problem. Generally speaking, humans can only focus visual attention on one thing at a time. Even if your eyes are in the direction of the road, if your attention is on your power numbers in the heads-up display, you might as well be looking down. A heads-up display does save the time and effort to look up and down, though. But paradoxically, by making it easier to give your attention to the screen it might actually reduce overall attention to the road and be more of a safety problem than a computer. Particularly with phone and text messaging features.