Google glasses, due this year, turn seeing into searching

Google is prepping a pair of augmented-reality glasses, according to one report. 

|
Oakley
The Google goggles are reported to resemble the Oakley Thump sunglasses. The Thump, pictured here in an image from an Oakley user's manual, includes a built-in MP3 player.

Google is prepping a pair of augmented reality glasses, which would allow users to receive, via a data connection, real-time information on their surroundings. According to a new report in The New York Times, the glasses – or Google goggles, if you like – will hit shelves by the end of the year, and retail for somewhere between $250 and $600. (The Times describes the glasses as being priced like an unsubsidized smartphone.) 

Unsurprisingly, Google has declined comment on the rumor, but the news does sync with a December post from Seth Weintraub, a blogger with 9 to 5 Google. The Google glasses, Weintraub wrote at the time, would "tie into Google’s location services. A user can walk around with information popping up and into display – Terminator-style – based on preferences, location and Google’s information." 

Weintraub says the goggles will resemble the Oakley Thumps, a pair of sunglasses equipped with an MP3 player. All of which, of course, sounds both immensely cool and terribly dorky. (Not to mention potentially fatal. You think people have trouble concentrating on walking and smartphone using now? Try giving them a pair of glasses with a camera and a heads-up display and a bunch of streaming imagery.)  

Of course, as Damon Brown notes in a smart piece over at PC World, Google has plenty of reasons to want to shill its own augmented-reality glasses. 

"Glasses are actually the final piece to Google’s mission: To know what a user doing every single moment of the day," Brown writes. "The search giant already is unifying some 60-odd products into one log-in for continuous online tracking. And, as we reported last week, it’s enticing you to use Google to come up with those web passwords." 

Sound a little paranoid? Wi-Fi and 3G equipped goggles would allow Google access not just to your location, but to the advertisements that catch your attention, the identity of your friends and family, the whole of the world as you see it. And that's scary stuff. 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut. And don’t forget to sign up for the weekly BizTech newsletter.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Google glasses, due this year, turn seeing into searching
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2012/0223/Google-glasses-due-this-year-turn-seeing-into-searching
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe