If someday in the future, in the main street, or in a coffee bar, or somewhere else, you come across a guy who wears a glass with no lenses in front of the eyes, be careful, s/he might be watching you and taking a nice picture of you, of course, without your notice.
Yeah, it is a glass. But, it is more than a glass, it is a computer, it is a tablet, it is a camera, it is a GPS navigator, and it is mobilized everything you can imagine. Its official name is called Project Glass, a kind of futuristic glasses that looks like a prop “Star Trek”. It is first mentioned by The New York Times in late February, illustrating an augmented-reality display, which will be mounted upper right corner of the right eye and running Android mobile platform.
On April, 4, Wednesday, Google proudly declared its secret initiative dubbed Project Glass. For the first time, a much clearer picture of this new stunning glass is presented to people and it is the company’s first venture into wearable computing. When it is commercially available, it may bring a thunder into the computing industry. As for now, the glasses are not yet ready for sale, still in experimenting period. Undeniably, Google will test them publicly.
Babak Parviz, Steve Lee and Sebastian Thrun, Google employees in the company laboratory known as Google X, posted a thread on Google Plus, and asked people for comments about how they think of the Project Glass prototype. The Google product manager Mr. Lee who in the first place worked on Google mapping software Latitude, mobile maps and indoor maps, is responsible for the software component and the location-based aspects of the glasses. “We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?”, the three engineers were quoted as saying so in the blog thread.
From the prototype version that Google showed off on Wednesday, it looked very much like a delicately polished and well-designed pair of wrap-around glasses with a clear display that sits above the eye. It is rumored that the glasses were able to stream information to the lenses. What’s more, it could also allow the wearer to send and receive messages through voice commands. In other words, the working is voice commanded. To enable the device to record and take pictures, they imported a built-in camera. Seems really fantastic. Can’t wait to grab one and fumble over it in your own hands? Well, enthusiasts must be patient enough, as a clear timetable for the availability is still not set.
Mr. Parviz, an associate professor at the University of Washington specializing in bionanotechnology, was quoted as saying, “Project Glass could hypothetically become Project Contact Lens”. A tiny contact lens he recently built embedded electronics and could display pixels to a person’s eye. From media outlets, it seems that there are dozens of other shapes and variations of the glasses undergone testing, even with some could be attached to people’s normal eyeglasses.
Project Glass is believed to be just one of many projects secretly being built at its X laboratory which Google built in its main Mountain View, Calif., the campus where lots of engineers and scientists are also working on robots and space elevators.
Will Google shock the world soon? We’ll wait and see.
