Google Glass Demo
For the past nine months, Google has been priming the public for the launch of Google Glass, a head-mounted, Internet-enabled display that—if you buy the hype—will revolutionize computing and totally rock your world.
A marketing blitz featured skydivers sporting Glass as they plummeted to Earth and runway models doing their best to strike a modish pose with the smart glasses perched on their noses. A YouTube video promoting the new specs tailed a man as he woke up, ate breakfast, went to a bookstore, met a friend, and shared a sunset with his girlfriend, all while receiving a stream of messages and augmented information about his surroundings on his Google Glass display.
In the next few months, Google will start shipping its smart spectacles to developers. More-polished consumer models are expected in 2014.
Details about Glass are still sketchy but here’s what we know. The lightweight browband, which looks like an ordinary pair of reading glasses minus the lenses, connects to an earpiece that has much the same electronics you’d find in an Android phone: a micro processor, a memory chip, a battery, a speaker, two microphones, a video camera, a Wi-Fi antenna, Bluetooth, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a compass. The microdisplay is positioned over one eye.
That hardware lets Glass record its wearer’s conversations and surroundings and store those recordings in the cloud; respond to voice commands, finger taps, and swipes on an earpiece that doubles as a touch pad; and automatically take pictures every 10 seconds. Prototypes connect to the Internet through Wi-Fi or through Bluetooth and a smartphone. Future versions will likely include a cellular antenna.
