Thursday 4 July 2013

Google glasses: seeing through google's eyes

              

Google Glass (styled "GLΛSS") is a wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display (OHMD) that is being developed by Google in the Project Glass research and development project, with the mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer. Google Glass displays information in a smartphone-like hands-free format, that can interact with the Internet via natural language voice commands. [wikipedia]

This tech toy has a camera and a voice-activated  device is worn like a pair of glasses and can tell you what you need to know. From sat-nav directions , names of food items, clothing, or devices, to name of the place you are currently in. You can record your favorite moments and take pictures of whatever you are directly looking at without a touch, just say the magic words. 'Say "take a picture" to take a picture. Record what you see, hands free. Even share what you see, live. Read more
For instance when you receive a mail, it is displayed right on the screen of your glass. Google as at the time of the launch, Glass will come with a set of lenses to turn them into sunglasses. Which is already in the market.Project Glass comes in five colors - black, gray, blue, red or white and have removable shades.


Navigating Naturally



Once the site appears, Glass tells you how to navigate with onscreen instructions, which are very helpful. Swipe the touchpad forward and backward to scroll. Swipe with two fingers to zoom. Tap and hold with two fingers to pan around the website just by moving your head, which feels totally natural.

What about links? Easy: Just tap with two fingers and don't hold. You'll see an option to open the link.

I first checked out how Glass' browser fared when I opened Mashable, a responsive design site that adapts to the browser and device it's viewed on. I could scroll either by swiping or holding with two fingers and tilting my head down. Either method has its advantages — swiping faster speeds up the scroll, and tilting the head downward has the same effect. The browser seemed to have no problems with everscroll.

How Mashable's site is rendered betrays one weakness of the Glass browser: It doesn't work with gestures. Normally, on a phone, I'd swipe from the right to see the next column (Mashable has three sections on the main page: Hot, Rising and New). On Glass, though, gestures are reserved for the device itself, so I had to target the actual section heading and tap on the link to see them. It's not as convenient, but there's a reason for the workaround.

Videos and More



Surfing to YouTube, I was pleased to discover that videos play on Glass immediately upon clicking. Playback wasn't perfect — during a few moments in the HBO trailer for Clear History, the video appeared to stutter, something I replicated on other YouTube videos — but it was generally fine.

Other video sites didn't fare so well. Glass was stumped by players for both Vimeo and DailyMotion. Those sites work in the Android browser on phones, so clearly Glass lacks a key plug-in or element that would make it compatible (something a future update may fix). Videos on CNN.com played flawlessly, however.

What about filling out forms or logging into sites, like Twitter or Amazon? Not on Glass, at least not yet. When you tap on a form field, you'll see a blinking cursor on the screen, but there's no way to fill it in. I envision a time when fields are tied to voice input and commands, but not in this version.

Swipe-to-scroll doesn't work on horizontally scrolling sites (like this one), although panning does. You'll have to crane your neck to see the whole site, but it's possible.

Short Path to the Web





There's an important tweak to how Glass works in XE7 that encourages browser use: If you tap while the words "OK Glass" are onscreen, the screen lists your options individually, instead of as a voice-activated list (as it did before). This makes a lot of sense — if I'm tapping in the first place, I may not want to speak. And since the first option is "Google," the path to the browser is extremely short.

Finally, one serious issue: The browser doesn't time out. I'm not sure if this is an oversight or controlled by design, but if you leave the browser open, it stays open — even if you don't interact with Glass for a while. I'm not sure if this is an oversight or controlled by design, but if you leave the browser open, it stays open — even if you don't interact with Glass for a while. This might be a design choice since there really isn't a way to "resume" the browser where you left off if you leave, but it will suck your battery dry if you forget to close it. Now i can go and on but i cant give you a feel of what it feels like wearing a google glass but you can either purchase it for a some of $1500 to $10,000 or watch the video from the following link bellow or see pictures too

http://mashable.com/2013/06/25/wimbledon-google-glass/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EvNxWhskf8
http://www.google.com/glass/start/how-it-feels/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BTCoT8ajbI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8lScHO2mM0











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