This Saturday, I tried Google Glass

I entered an iPhone app into an App Challenge my friends hosted for the university. One of the visitors to the Challenge owned a pair of Glass as part of the research he was doing, and I got to try it on. It was pretty cool!

You tilt your head up to activate the menu. From there, as seen on various YouTube videos, you activate the available options by saying, “Okay Glass.” A menu appears, and you can view all of the options by nodding your head up and down. These include taking a picture, sending a text, looking something up, etc. The photos taken with the device are automatically synced with your phone and then uploaded to your Google account. So storage is limited by your phone, not the glasses.

There is an infrared pupil sensor on the inside of the unit, near the screen. This allows you to take pictures by winking. I’d read about this online a few months ago. It’s a little creepy, but it sure is more convenient than telling it to “take a picture” every time.

The complaints that the guy had who let me try them out were that the battery life is poor, they overheat (especially when watching YouTube videos), and they’re a little conspicuous. The voice recognition also needs some work; He had kids, and said it was difficult to operate when they were talking to him, as it would pick up their voices instead of his.

In summary, it’s a cool idea and I can definitely see the utility. But it’s still in beta, and I have to agree that it’s definitely conspicuous. I’ll wait to buy them until Google finds a way to make these into contact lenses.