Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) futuristic Internet glasses are becoming closer to reality, although the freakish contraptions still carry a freakish price--$1,500 a pair for developers who want to try them out in prototype form, a Google executive said during the company's three day I/O conference in San Francisco.
"We want to get it out into the hands of passionate people as soon as possible," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said, according to an Associated Press story.
The glasses seemingly do everything but improve your vision or shade the sun. At least there's been no word that they'll come out in a prescription format.
Those with 20/20 vision or just no need to see clearly, can use the glasses to get destination directions or video chat with friends, take photos without a camera or phone and even buy things that catch their eyes--like maybe a pair of prescription sunglasses.
According to an engineer working on the project, the glasses should interact with people's senses without blocking them via a display that appears as a small rectangular on a rim above the right eye.
Google hopes they appeal to runners, bicyclists and other athletes "who want to take pictures of their activities as they happen," the story said.
Brin, who has made the glasses the focal point of his work of late, admitted that there are a variety of bugs that need to be fixed, that battery life needs to be extended and, importantly, that the glasses will cost more than smartphones. Even so, a version that comes in under $1,500 is planned for 2014.
"I think we are definitely pushing the limits," Brin reportedly said after his public comments at the conference. "That is out job: to push the edges of technology into the future."
Only introduced in April, after more than two years of secret development, the glasses for now are in the hands of Google engineers working out bugs and developers willing to pay the price to work with them. And while they're at it, they might also want to get behind the wheel of a fleet of driverless cars that the Google X lab has developed. But that's even more futuristic than the glasses.
For more:
- see the AP story
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