Project Glass: Another step toward embracing the Godgle

            It isn’t exactly cutting edge news as the announcement managed to hit most media and press releases in early April of this year, but I think in keeping with my supporting the super-intelligence candidacy for Godgle, the Google Project Glass prototype deserves another look.

            I mentioned the science fiction author, Vernor Vinge, in a recent post and would like to visit a concept from his 1999 novel A Deepness in the Sky. The milieu for A Deepness is perhaps within a thousand years in an alternate dimension or universe to our own, as the technology is slightly advanced, but in many ways very similar. Without delving into a dissection of this fabulous novel and its plot (which I highly recommend!), I’d like to focus on one particular piece of technology Vinge envisions. In his book, Vinge refers to them as head up displays or HUDs. They are, by no stretch of the imagination, the exact same technology as Google’s Project Glass: glasses or goggles, which allow interaction with both local and wide-area networks through voice command and eye-tracking.

            Google unveiled this project to subtle fanfare. When we perceive how Bluetooth headpieces brought us fully into the futuristic musings of Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek transcoders, we can also see how this new project undertaken by Google will bring us into a whole new way of encountering and interacting with the datasphere. This is big-time stuff. This is going to make the iPhone, the iPad, and all other tablet and touch technologies look like the cave man who kept pushing rocks up a hill after another guy discovered the wheel.
             While the eye-tracking implementation may not have found incorporation into the design yet, I can assure you the technology exists and will find its way into the design shortly. Further attention and development with EEG and BCIs will allow technologies like Project Glass to take us directly into the virtual or augmented reality we are all collectively building on the web.

            Sergey Brin of Google appeared recently on the Gavin Newsom Show to demonstrate the technology. While we don’t get to see the user’s perspective, the brief interaction with this profound piece of R&D boasts a staggering future of computing possibilities.

            After seeing these specs in action, I can only stand out in the crowd waving my arms wildly in the air, yelling “Hire me to Google X Lab! I want to help design and conceptualize this kind of stuff, too!!”