It’s a mild summer’s day in San Francisco on June 27 2012. Google co-founder Sergey Brin steps onto the stage at the Moscone Centre, where the company’s annual I/O event is in full-swing.
I/O stands for input/output and ‘Innovation in the Open’, the event a chance for the search giant to demonstrate its newest products and services. From humble beginnings as a research project in 1996, the company grew on its mission to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Now, Google is responsible for a 58 per cent market share in mobile computing, thanks to Android, with over 1.3 million activations per day, and handles over 20,000 searches per second on trillions of websites on the Internet. Almost half a petabyte of data is stored redundantly over nine data centres across the world, with four more under construction to meet demand.
Today, Sergey Brin is putting all the technical specifications to the side and focusing on the ways humans can interact with technology in a more efficient and accessible way.
He is wearing a pair of charcoal-coloured glasses with no lenses in the frame. A clear glass prism sits on one side of the device, which doesn’t obstruct the wearer’s normal field of vision yet is always present. The skyline of the San Francisco bay area is projected behind him, which towers above the audience. Brin turns to them and asks, “So who wants to see a demo of Glass?”
Google Glass is the company’s latest innovation, comprising of an aluminium band with two nose pads. On one side sits the onboard computer and heads-up-display. Glass will include a GPS chip, wi-fi antenna, and Bluetooth in order to tether to a smartphone. It is marketed as a wearable computing device; something that can accompany the smartphone for now, but someday set itself free from the confines of the technological limitations of today.
The view cuts to the interior of a Zeppelin flying overhead. Two skydivers can be seen armed with Glass, which it is soon revealed that the entire team possesses. The doors open, the sound of gushing wind smothers the audio being transmitted from the tiny microphone, and they jump. Images of the pale blue sky and deep green sea engulf the audience, followed by a labyrinth of cement-gray structures on the ground. The tiny camera inside Glass is able to broadcast whatever the wearer is seeing to a Google+ hangout. The skydivers plummet towards the earth with the shining sun behind them, slowing as they deploy their parachutes.
The view is switched between the five skydivers. The audience, so far away yet so close, are fixated on the projection as the skydivers form a queue to land on the roof of Moscone Centre. The ground team, comprised of cameramen and bikers, meet them on the large open expanse of the roof. One of the skydivers hands a package to a biker, who is also equipped with Glass, and they begin their journey across the roof. It quickly ends up in the hands of a man who rappels down the side of the building, landing on the balcony of the third floor and passing it on to yet another biker wearing the elusive charcoal glasses. The audience watch with anticipation as the package makes its way inside, and finally down the aisle of the auditorium into the hands of Sergey Brin.
It is as if God (or whatever all-seeing entity you believe in) suddenly bestowed the world with a gift, and Google Glass was there to capture it all and stream it live. (The package was Google’s new Android tablet, the Nexus 7).
Fast-forward to late February 2013 and the company has just launched their #ifihadglass competition, releasing the ‘How It Feels [through Glass]‘ promotional video. Prospective beta-testers could tweet or post to Google+ about what they would do if they found themselves in possession of those charcoal glasses, with the hashtag #ifihadglass. The chosen few, dubbed “explorers” by Google, would be required to pay $1,500 for a Glass unit, while also attending a pickup event in either New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles.
Notable winners, as reported by Gizmodo, included @jewelry_wolf, who tweeted “#ifihadglass I would dump hundreds of bedtime stories in it. And I’ll sit at my boy’s bed, ask my glass to pick one and read it for him”. Others were more skeptical, such as @bombaycowgirl, who asks “#ifihadglass oh #Google, must the future look like this…” Google is obviously attempting to craft Glass into something appealing for everyone, and so has courted her into the explorer program.
Google wants a mass-market approach with Glass, which shows in their newest promotional video advertising the use of Glass in many different situations.
It’s 6:20 in the morning. The Glass wearer stares into the sunrise, which is flooding the distant mountains with golden light. There are buildings on the ground below. The view is tilted upwards, and we realise he is on a hot-air balloon. There is an omnipresent grey rectangle on the top right corner as the video cuts to different first-person perspectives, ranging from extreme sports to everyday moments—activities that are all seemingly enriched through the use of Glass.
The rectangle is a sort of add on for reality, an augmented view of the world. It displays a card-like interface similar to that of Google Now, their competitor to Apple’s Siri. The idea behind Now was co-founder Larry Page’s vision for Google to be “faster than instant”, presenting the user with “the right information at the right time”. Glass is an extension of that philosophy; the right time is always, and the right information is everything.
Wearers of Glass can ask for information like the weather, maps, sports scores; pretty much everything and anything present on the internet. Two simple words, “ok glass”, opens the door to a wealth of information. Glass also includes the hardware to take photos and record videos, and can act as a glorified webcam for video-chatting—what Google calls “hangouts”, which users of the much resented Google+ social networking site will be familiar with.
There will be tight integration with Google’s native services such as Plus. Whether third-parties such as their main competitors, Twitter and Facebook, will be able to tap into Glass programming interface is unknown. While Google’s Android operating system is open source, Glass may not be.
Joshua Topolsky, editor at The Verge, describes Glass as “a completely new kind of computing device; wearable, designed to reduce distraction, created to allow you to capture and communicate in a way that is supposed to feel completely natural to the wearer. It’s the anti-smartphone, explicitly fashioned to blow apart our notions of how we interact with technology.”
The Glass wearer receives a message asking, “How’s the view up there?”
He looks onto the mass of hot air balloons against a backdrop of a pale sky and turns his head to the east, past the buildings on the ground. The camera adjusts to expose for the background. The balloons become a silhouette, and the sunrise peaks over the distant mountains.
“It’s beautiful,” he replies.