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Technology

Google Glasses: Don’t plan on buying them for Christmas

April 06, 2012

View Photo Gallery - : Google’s Project Glass pulls open the curtains on Google X, the company’s…

There has been a lot of buzz lately about Google’s Project Glass, but don’t expect to see the augmented reality glasses in stores any time soon, The Post’s Hayley Tsukayama reports :

There is a real-world prototype, but you have to have some serious connections to get them. Technology blogger Robert Scoble posted pictures to his Twitter account Thursday of Google co-founder Sergey Brin sporting a pair of the glasses while out to dinner.

“Sergey wouldn’t let me wear the Google Glasses but I could see they were flashing info to him,” Scoble tweeted. He said that the glasses are “many months, if not years” away from becoming a consumer product.

That lines up with the little information that’s come from Google on the product. According to the project’s developers, the glasses video and press shots are meant to spark discussion about what the product could look like, and do.

“We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input,” wrote the Google Glass team on their Google+ page. “So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable to you do.”

Keywords to note there are “could” and “might.”

The Post’s Maura Judkis wonders if the glasses are cool or creepy:

Google’s Project Glass — a pair of augmented-reality glasses that allows you to navigate the Web through your field of vision — has made its online debut, and the overall reaction is: Awesome. I think.

The question mark comes from our collective uncertainty over the “Minority Report”-like implications of a pair of glasses that bring computing closer to your retinas. After the company released a video demonstrating the potential of the glasses for planning your day and navigating a city, hands-free, the “I want that” tweets started to roll in just as quickly as the “Wow, he looks like a cyborg” tweets appeared. We are uncertain about the implications of these Google glasses for our future, but we know for sure they are cool.

Reactions were as follows:

• OMG TOTALLY AWESOME:

While many tech blogs resisted the urge to gush about the glasses, Twitter users demonstrated no such restraint. Neither did Chris Davies of Slashgear, who write: “Project Glass has opened my eyes and my wallet: Google, please, come help yourself to my credit card. The much-rumored wearable augmented reality system has emerged from the Google[x] skunkworks and it’s even more than we hoped for.”...

• Doesn’t this mean that we will see ads all the time now?

Advertisements aren’t shown in the promo video, but one imagines that any Google product will have advertising. Potential customers are wondering how the ads will be integrated into the Project Glass experience. CNET envisions that the glasses will make it easier to sell you things, as local retailers could potentially have coupons for their businesses flash by your glasses as you walk by their stores. Google Coupons, which hasn’t gained much traction yet, will certainly benefit, notes PC World. You could shop online and in stores at the same time. Via Photoshop, one reader imagined the view from the glasses with ads.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin says the feedback he’s received has been ‘very useful,’ The Verge reported Thursday:

We managed to catch up with Sergey Brin tonight, following the charity event where he was spotted wearing Google's Project Glass augmented reality glasses. The Google co-founder told us that the glasses are still very much at the early prototype stage. While he said the company doesn't usually like to announce products so far in advance, Google had done so in this case in order to collect feedback on what people think of the concept, and how they would like to use the product itself — something which he said the company has already found "very useful." While a fully-functioning product was presented in Google's announcement video, the prototype glasses aren't quite there yet, with Brin commenting that "right now you really just see it reboot."

He declined to clarify whether the prototypes were self-powered, but did state that Google hopes that the final product will be able to connect to all kinds of different devices. The glasses will also need to undergo the usual RF radiation testing seen with wireless devices, an issue the Google co-founder cited as being of particular importance to him — presumably to assuage concerns about strapping what amounts to a smartphone to your head.

It has been recently reported that Google is hoping to bring Project Glass to market by the end of this year, but when asked about possible release dates, Brin simply replied, "Give us time."

More technology coverage:

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