Remember as a child, how your parents said that it was believed that by the year 2000 there would be flying cars and holograms? Well, while that may not have been entirely accurate – they weren’t wrong when they said there were a lot of cool things to come.
Before we can get into “Project Glass”, let’s talk about augmented reality (AR). What does it mean? Augmented reality involves a real world environment augmented with computer generated sensory input such as graphics, etc. While this aspect of technology has been explored, there aren’t a lot of products that use this technology – at least not anything as cool as Project Glass! Just to familiarize you, a few products that use AR include those funny accessories you can wear in google chat and the AR cards for the Nintendo 3DS. Other examples can be found here and here. If you want to try a few AR programs out yourself check the app store on your phone if you have a smartphone.
Anywho, enough of that. Lets talk about Project Glass. Or rather… Project Glasses? Project Glass is a project initiated by Google that is aimed at designing glasses that involve AR – with these glasses you should be able to look for directions, check the weather and even video call your friends?! Perhaps we too will have the ability to wield crazy computerized glasses like Cookie from Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide or a spy from almost every action – flick created.
These glasses appear to use a built-in camera to analyze “reality” – the world around you. The glasses then use this visual information (or auditory) to give you a variety of options such as “checking-in” in to locations using a Google Android interface (sorry all you iPhone and Blackberry addicts).
Unfortunately these cool specs will not likely be available until 2014. You do have the option of preordering these glasses for a whopping $1500. If you have the patience to wait until the product is released however, Google estimates the cost to be around that of a modern smartphone. Hey, but I guess that’s what it takes for the first steps into the futuristic societies anticipated by the previous generation.