People wearing Google’s
glasses are transported to a strange new world in which the Internet is
always in their line of sight. But for people looking at the people
wearing those glasses, the view is even stranger — someone wearing a
computer processor, a battery and a tiny screen on her face.
As Google and other companies begin to build wearable technology like
glasses and watches, an industry not known for its fashion sense is
facing a new challenge — how to be stylish. Design has always been
important to technology, with products like Apple’s becoming fashion
statements, but designing hardware that people will wear like jewelry is
an entirely different task.
In a sign of how acute the challenge is for Google, the company is negotiating with Warby Parker,
an e-commerce start-up company that sells trendy eyeglasses, to help it
design more fashionable frames, according to two people briefed on the
negotiations who were not authorized to speak publicly because the
partnership has not been made official.
Google and Warby Parker declined
to comment.They join other companies that are grappling with these design
challenges, including big companies like Apple, Nike and Jawbone and
smaller ones like Pebble, MetaWatch and Misfit Wearables.
Jawbone’s health-tracking wristband, Up, for instance, was designed by
Yves Behar, the company’s chief creative officer and a well-known
designer who has worked with fashion and furniture companies. Apple,
which is said to be making a smart watch, has assigned some of its top designers to make curved glass that is comfortable and aesthetically appealing.
On Wednesday, Google began accepting applications
to choose a small group of people to buy an early version of the
glasses, called Google Glass. It hopes to sell Glass to the broader
public this year, according to two people briefed on the plans.
The frames do not have lenses, though Google is experimenting with
adding sunglass or prescription lenses in some versions. They have a
tiny screen that appears much bigger from the wearer’s perspective than
it does on the frame. Glass wearers can take pictures or record video
without using their hands, send the images to friends or post them
online, see walking directions, search the Web by voice command and view
language translations.
The glasses reach the Internet through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, which
connects to the wireless service on a user’s cellphone. The glasses
respond when a user speaks, touches the frame or moves the head.
For Google, the glasses are a major step toward its dream of what is known as ubiquitous computing
— the idea that computers and the Internet will be accessible anywhere
and we can ask them to do things without lifting a finger.
The glasses will eventually incorporate several Google products, which
could become more useful when they are in front of a user’s eyes rather
than on a phone or a computer screen.
For instance, the latest version of the glasses can provide walking and
hiking directions from Google Maps, alerts from Google Now about a
coming meeting or a traffic jam, and video chats from Google Hangouts.
In a video released on
Wednesday, Google offered ideas about what to do with the glasses. A
ballerina could record and stream live video behind the scenes and
onstage; a tourist in Thailand could ask Google to translate the word
“delicious” while eating noodles on a boat; or a family could video chat
over a long distance with a relative on her birthday.
Other seemingly far-fetched uses are not far off. The glasses could be
used to play an augmented reality game in which the real world was
annotated with virtual information. Google has such a smartphone app,
called Ingress. Users could photograph an object or building and the
glasses could identify it, something that is already possible using
Google on phones and computers.
Though Google warns of technical bumps as people use the glasses, it has
already solved many of the technical challenges. The biggest obstacle
now is getting people to use them.
Though Google employees have been spotted wearing them in the San
Francisco Bay Area, they receive strange looks, for example, from a bartender who made fun of his Glass-wearing patrons.
Privacy advocates worry about a day when people wearing glasses could
use facial recognition to identify strangers on the street or
surreptitiously record and broadcast conversations. On a more mundane
level, rude behavior like checking e-mail during conversations would
become much easier to hide.
google glasses 
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