The frosted-glass doors on the 11th floor of Google’s NYC headquarters part and a woman steps onward to greet me. This is an otherwise normal specimen of civilization. Normal height, slender builds; her eyes are bright, curious.
She leans in to shake my hand and at that moment I become intensely aware of the machine she’s wearing in the place you would imagine eyeglasses: a thin strip of aluminum and plastic with a weird, prismatic lens just underneath her brow.
What was a total peculiarity a year ago, and little more than a research just 18 months ago is now starting to look like a real invention. One that might be in the hands (or on the heads, rather) of customers by the end of this year.
A totally new kind of computing device; wearable, intended to reduce disruption, created to allow you to capture and converse in a way that is supposed to feel completely usual to the wearer. It’s the anti-Smartphone, clearly fashioned to blow apart our notions of how we network with technology.
The Glass project was started "about three years ago" by an engineer named Babak Parviz as part of Google’s X Lab plan, the lab also responsible for among other things self-driving cars and neural networks. Dissimilar those classic, sci-fi R&D projects at Google, Glass is receiving real much earlier than anyone expected.
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