Hasta La Gadget!

Today, Steve Lee of the Google X and Glass Team, announced that as of last week, all 2,000 developers who signed up for the Glass Explorer program at last year’s I/O conference have now been invited to pick up their devices from Google’s offices in Mountain View, New York City or Los Angeles.

Of course, not everyone has to actually pay the $1,500 to get them if they don’t want to, but it’s safe to say that most of these developers will be picking them up and dropping down the cash.

Lee also noted that the 8,000 #ifihadglass “winners” who still have to pay their way will start getting theirs soon. The importance of having the device in the hands of those who will be building apps, the only way that we’ll ever know what the device is capable of, was not an easy thing to do. You can’t really seed a device that sits on your face quietly, thus the need for an Explorer program that was announced last year. Lee said: “This isn’t something that we could have worked on in some secret lab; it had to be out in the real world.”

Lee also noted that Glass will receive monthly software updates with bug fixes and new features, which means that we can expect another one to come sometime in early June, similar to the one on May 8th. The experience wasn’t completely overhauled with the last update; the introduction of a “long press” for search was handy.

As we’ve walked around the I/O conference, it’s been commonplace to find someone stopping to take a picture or slide through the timeline in front of their place. There are still a lot of questions to be answered as to whether this is a device that will catch on for consumers, but watching its evolution in the earliest days is fun.

Something that’s interesting to note is that Google executives, like Larry Page and Vic Gundotra, haven’t been sporting their Glass, specifically on stage yesterday for the keynote. Some feel like this was a way to tone down the hype about the product, letting developers take over the “spokesperson” role for Glass.

Corning’s Lotus Glass promised a world full of thinner, more advanced mobile displays when it was unveiled in 2011, but it hasn’t always been easy to build with the volumes or features that customers want. Enter the company’s new Lotus XT Glass as the solution: clients can produce it more reliably at high temperatures, leading to more usable panels for our LCDs and OLEDs. The improved yields should not only result in larger device volumes than the original Lotus Glass could muster, but push the technological limits — Corning notes that hotter manufacturing allows for brighter, sharper and more efficient screens. The glass is commercially available today, although we’ll still need to wait for gadget makers to choose, implement and ship it before we notice the XT difference.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile

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Source: Corning

The I/O news faucet hasn’t quite dried up yet. During the San Francisco conference today, Google chatted up some new Glass apps. The new applications will come packaged as “Glassware,” delivering CNN breaking news alerts, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook posts, Evernote reminders and articles from Elle Magazine. The New York Times and Path were the only two apps previously available to Explorers, making this new suite of products a very welcome addition indeed. More apps are no doubt on the way — hundreds of developers are working to produce their own software for the Google-branded headgear, which is set to launch for consumers sometime next year.

Filed under: Wearables, Software, Google

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Source: The New York Times

As a part of the 7 Techmakers and a Microphone panel tonight at Google I/O, Project Glass Staff Hardware Engineer Jean Wang dropped in this slide reflecting on the process of developing the headset. We’ve seen pictures of a few early Glass prototypes before, but as she describes, this shows off the full process from strapping a cellphone to a pair of goggles along with a pico projector shining directly into the wearer’s eyes. The jump from off the shelf components to custom 3D-printed materials is represented in the third version (top right), and allowed the progress seen along the bottom row.

She also got a laugh pointing out that the Glass-inspired SNL skit starring our friend Fred Armisen wasn’t “too far off” the team’s initial efforts in gesture and voice control. The panel itself focused on a series of TED-style segments featuring seven women discussing being technical leaders inside their company. You can check out the entire thing embedded after the break or just zoom to the Google Glass part (6:13) for more details.

Filed under: Wearables, Google

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Via: Danny Sullivan (Twitter)

Source: Google Developers (YouTube), Google Developers

We’ve seen a few interesting apps built specifically for Google’s new headset but, to our knowledge MedRef for Glass is the first that recognize people’s faces. The basic functions aren’t anything terribly ground breaking: you can create and search patient files, and even add voice or photo notes. What makes Lance Nanek’s creation unique is its support for facial recognition. A user can snap a picture of a subject and upload it to the cloud, where it will search patient records for a match using the Betaface API. All of this can be done, relatively hands-free leaving a doctors well-trained mitts available to perform other necessary medical duties. There’s still a lot of work to do, and Nanek hopes that with more powerful hardware the facial recognition feature could be left running constantly, removing the need to snap and upload photos. In the meantime, if you’re one of the lucky few to have an Explorer edition of Google Glass you can install the package at the source link. Otherwise, you’ll have to make do with the demo video after the break.

Filed under: Wearables, Software, Google

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Via: SlashGear

Source: MedRef for Glass, NeatoCode