More than 70 people turned out to see ‘Glass’
LONDON: Last night we ran the first Google Glass Master Class with The Guardian newspaper in London, at their offices.
Glass, for those who are not yet familiar with it, is Google’s latest and most interesting piece of new technology.
It is called ‘wearable tech’, that is, you wear it. They are, at first glance, a pair of glasses that have a small camera/screen combination built into them that hangs in front of your eye.
They are still in a kind of beta test phase. Only 10,000 have been sold to a group of Google Glass Explorers. You have to apply for the opportunity.
Having been an Explorer now for several months, I think I can fairly say that this is going to happen.
The best way to explain this is to say that this is like having your iPhone in front of your face all the time.
It is called ‘wearable’ tech but in reality, I prefer to call it ’embedded’ tech – that is, you are effectively embedded into the web all the time. You are living online. It is a constant resource, always at your fingertips (or eyeballs).
What makes this particularly interesting is that it not only has the screen, but also a small camera that can record HD video and stills.
This means that, among other things, you can shoot pictures, video or (and this is the real game-changer in my mind) live stream from anywhere in the world at any time – live.
It used to be that to do a live video feed from somewhere in the world you had to have a camera crew, book satellite time, have an uplink and so on.
Even with the web, live feeds from war zones, riots, music concerts, festivals, pretty much anything were rare (think of the Olympics). With Glass, the world is going to have a billion people who can live feed all the time – for free.
If that isn’t a game-changer, I don’t know what is.
Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2014
