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Gadget lovers may soon be adding glasses to their growing list of tech toys. This week, reports that Google will release “heads-up display glasses” by the end of the year spread quickly in the tech sphere.
Though Google did not confirm if it was working on glasses that will “be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time”, as the New York Times and 9 to 5 Google reported, many speculated that such a product could be the start of “wearable computing”.
The “Terminator glasses,” as many have been calling them, are very “provocative,” according to Greg Sterling of Search Engline Land. Whether the glasses succeed or fail, Google is taking “‘visual search’ to an entirely new level”, he added.
Chris Davies, who calls himself a “geek, an early-adopter and a lover of science-fiction,” explained the reasons he would buy Google’s glasses on Slashgear, while Tom Krazit of GigaOm wrote that if Google is working on glasses, it could be a “potential privacy minefield”.
Whereas Krazit highlighted the risks of the glasses, Rebecca J. Rosen of The Atlantic argued that predicting the influence of new gadgets is a “fool’s errand”:
The point here isn’t that of course Google’s glasses will become the next TV or telephone, but that it is very hard to estimate the ways a new tool can rework society. Whether Google’s glasses find widespread adoption will in part rest on the details of the interface — whether it seems to integrate naturally with the visual world or obscure and clutter it. But surely, if Google’s glasses fail, they will not be the final attempt at wearable tech — this is something whose appeal runs deep.
