Google Glass or “Project Glass” is one of the search giant’s most anticipated and innovative projects to date. The plan for these augmented reality spectacles is to give you a wearable Android smartphone experience, using voice commands to control the majority of the operations. So far all we’ve seen of the glasses in action was last year’s awesome Google I/O demonstration which included skydivers, mountain bikers, and repellers all participating in a Google Hangout, as well as appearance on California Lieutenant Governor’s “The Gavin Newsom Show”. But now it appears that these glasses are seeing the light of day to outsiders, albeit a very limited group.
It seems as though recently Google hosted a “Tech Talk” at Stanford and one engineer, Souma Mohan, a self described “Engineer in Pursuit”, wrote about his experience on quora. In an answer to the question “Google Glass: what do users actually see?” Mohan writes that “a small screen was visible on the top right corner”, upon turning on the device.
On the screen was a list menu with a black background and white lettering showcasing options such as, “click a picture”, “shoot a video”, and “voice call”. Obviously with such a small screen Mohan tells us that there are only four or five options visible at a time and these were able to be cycled through by motion. “Moving my head up and down also caused the list to scroll in a vertical fashion.” Additionally there was also a touch pad by the right ear which would also appear to be a way of scrolling.
Last but not least he describes the voice commands which can be used to do all of the above functions. “I clicked a picture using the voice command. The screen automatically showed me the clicked picture just after I instructed the device to click it.”
Obviously we are still in the very early stages and these are still just prototypes but they are slowly but surely inching closer to an eventual launch. Let’s not forget that Google will be conducting a set of “hackathons” which will be comprised of developers who signed up for “Glass Explorer Program” and paid $1,500 for the opportunity to pre-order a pair, so maybe we’ll be getting more Google Glass info in the near future.