As reported on The Verge.
By Dan Seifert
Google’s Project Glass product, the company’s venture into wearable computing, was officially unveiled over half a year ago at the Google I/O conference. Since then, we haven’t heard much from Google about the device, but today IEEE Spectrum published an interview with Babak Parviz, head of the project at Google. Parviz didn’t reveal too much that we didn’t already know, but he did lend a few details about Google’s intentions for Glass and how far along it is in its development process.
Currently, Parviz says that Glass has a touch pad for user control, but the company is still developing voice commands and head gestures for more intuitive control of the device. Google hopes to be able to get a full day of battery life out of Glass, but again, this is still in development and not nearly complete. As is the ability to accept phone calls with Glass, says Parviz.
“AUGMENTED REALITY IS EXCITING WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT FUTURE GENERATIONS OF THIS TYPE OF WEARABLE COMPUTING.”
Though Google is well known for its advertising business, Parviz claims that there are no plans to incorporate advertising into Glass. Additionally, though Parviz says that augmented reality isn’t “our immediate goal for Google Glass, I think in the future that augmented reality will also come into the picture. So augmented reality is exciting when you think about future generations of this type of wearable computing.”
But the development of Glass is still very much a work in progress, and Parviz admits that the feature set for the device is not yet fully determined. “It is still in flux,” he notes. He says that developers will be able to write apps that take advantage of a “cloud-based API” to tap into Glass services once the device ships. The first people to get a crack at owning Google Glass devices will be attendees of 2012’s I/O conference that were willing to part with $1,500 for the privilege. Google had said that those pre-ordered devices would begin shipping some time this year, and it doesn’t look like that goal has changed. The company hopes to have a consumer version available by 2014. Whether or not the company will make that target remains to be seen.