Updated: 07:41, Tuesday November 20, 2012. Plea for truce as death toll rises. Israeli strikes have killed 24 Palestinians, taking the Gaza death toll past 100 as UN chief Ban Ki-moon joined efforts to broker a truce to end the worst violence in four years. As the …
While Google isn’t ready to answer all of the questions we have about its Project Glass concept yet, a member of the team has chimed in on one of the most common questions — could it work even the user wears prescription glasses? Industrial designer Isabelle Olsson says the team ideally wants it to work for everyone, and posted a photo of the Glass-on-glasses mockup shown above to her Google+ page. Unless you’re a Google exec this doesn’t bring you any closer to going retinas-on with the heads-up display / augmented reality project yourself, but hopefully it keeps the dream alive even for the near / far sighted among us.
While Google isn’t ready to answer all of the questions we have about its Project Glass concept yet, a member of the team has chimed in on one of the most common questions — could it work even the user wears prescription glasses? Industrial designer Isabelle Olsson says the team ideally wants it to work for everyone, and posted a photo of the Glass-on-glasses mockup shown above to her Google+ page. Unless you’re a Google exec this doesn’t bring you any closer to going retinas-on with the heads-up display / augmented reality project yourself, but hopefully it keeps the dream alive even for the near / far sighted among us.
After a few months of speculation, Google revealed some information about the project that will make Google Goggles and other mobile apps more useful. Instead of using a smartphone to find information about an object, translate a text, get directions, compare prices, you can use some smart glasses that augment the reality and help you understand more about that things around you.
“We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t. A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment,” says Google.
There’s also a video that shows why the glasses could be helpful:
Google’s concept glasses have a camera, a microphone and can connect to the Internet to send and receive data in real time. The interface is simple and it only shows relevant information.
One of the people who used the glasses said that “they let technology get out of your way. If I want to take a picture I don’t have to reach into my pocket and take out my phone; I just press a button at the top of the glasses and that’s it.”
In February, New York Times reported that “the glasses [could] go on sale to the public by the end of the year. (…) The people familiar with the Google glasses said they would be Android-based, and will include a small screen that will sit a few inches from someone’s eye. They will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and a number of sensors including motion and GPS.” Seth Weintraub found that “the navigation system currently used is a head tilting-to scroll and click, (…) I/O on the glasses will also include voice input and output, and we are told the CPU/RAM/storage hardware is near the equivalent of a generation-old Android smartphone”.
It will be interesting to see if Google will actually sell these smart glasses. There are a lot of issues that need to be solved before releasing a commercial product: from battery life to packaging so much technology in a such a small product, from improving Google Goggles to handling real-time video streaming.
The good news: Google has started testing those augmented reality glasses we heard about earlier in the year. The bad news: if the artsy shots of the test units are to be believed, they won’t make you look like some ’80s cinematic anti-hero. In fact, the things wouldn’t look too out of place in a New York Times style story. The software giant let it be known that, while it hasn’t quite got a sale date on the wearables, it’s ready to test ProjectGlass amongst the non-augmented public. The company is also looking for feedback on the project, writing in a post today, “we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input.” Want some idea of what ProjectGlass might offer the public? Sure, it’s not quite as good as strapping a pair on your own eyes, but interested parties can check out a video of Google’s vision after the break.
Well, that didn’t take long. One day after agreeing to implement a do not track button as part of a new consumer bill of rights, Google has given the people what they want… sort of. Keep My Opt-Outs is a Chrome extension, developed by the Mountain View team, that will prevent advertisers from using your browsing history against you. Presumably, this function will get built straight into the browser one day but, for now, you have to go dig it up in the Chrome Web Store — far from an ideal solution. Still, a tepid step into the shallow end is better than no step at all. You can install the extension yourself at the source.
Update: As a few of you have noted, this extension has actually been available for quite some time, since Google originally announced the ad cookie blocker back in 2011. Check out the details in the team’s original Public Policy blog post and combine it with a dose of web history cleaning to keep your activities to yourself.
Canonical’s announcement of Ubuntu for Android kicked up quite a stir, but it also left us with a few unknowns. The idea is that your phone becomes a mobile PC, switching from Android into full desktop Ubuntu mode when you dock it to a bigger display, keyboard and mouse. But just how well does it perform? When is it coming? How is it coming? And will tinkerers be able to install it for themselves? Canonical let us into its London office today to try out the software and pepper one of its engineers with questions. First, the good news: Ubuntu for Android is everything it’s been claimed to be. It’s a functional desktop OS that sits alongside Android, shares the same kernel and has full read / write access to everything on your phone (the connectivity hardware itself plus contacts, emails, videos, apps and pretty much everything else.). It’s also ready for ARM-compatible Ubuntu apps, potentially expanding the range of things your phone can do.
The bad news? It needs to be faster — a lot faster. The prototype we saw was running on a TI OMAP 4430-powered Motorola Atrix 2 that had primarily been chosen for its ready-made docking accessory. The software hadn’t been customized for that handset and neither Motorola nor TI have so far been involved in the project. Despite this, some tasks ran surprisingly well, like watching a video or adjusting a photo. However, surfing on the Chromium desktop browser suffered too much hanging and it was also clear that multi-tasking would be a serious burden. According to Canonical, better performance will come when manufacturers tailor the software to their newest handsets and offer it pre-installed. The company is doing everything it can to make that happen — meeting with big players at MWC next week and trying to persuade them that it’s not too late to offer Ubuntu on models scheduled for launch this year. We asked if Canonical would make the OS available to us ordinary folk sooner than that, so we can play with it and give our feedback, but that just isn’t part of the company’s game plan right now — everything hinges on manufacturers seeing the ‘differentiation’ value and climbing aboard. To tide you over in the meantime, click past the break for a hands-on video.
As Google’s Street View vans cruise around the world, they don’t just capture static images of roads, buildings and fields. They take candid snapshots of humanity – images that can be funny, disturbing, strange and haunting. They have frozen moments of grief and despair, of car accidents and burning houses, but also couples embracing and children laughing. A project called The Nine Eyes of Google Street View by Jon Rafman brings these images together into a poignant collection.
The title of the project refers to the nine camera lenses mounted to the roof of the Google Street View van as it travels. These images are stitched together digitally to create panoramic views, blurring out faces and license plates. Rafman combs through Google Street View images to find the most interesting shots.
The project began in 2009, and Rafman continues to add more images to his Tumblr, 9-eyes.com. Some recent additions include children holding toy guns, a baby crawling alone on a sidewalk outside a Gucci store, horses running alongside a scenic cemetery and a busted fire hydrant spraying water into the lens.
Says Rafman in an essay about the project, “Within the panoramas, I can locate images of gritty urban life reminiscent of hard-boiled American street photography. Or, if I prefer, I can find images of rural Americana that recall photography commissioned by the Farm Securities Administration during the depression. I can seek out postcard-perfect shots that capture what Cartier-Bresson titled “the decisive moment,” as if I were a photojournalist responding instantaneously to an emerging event. At other times, I have been mesmerized by the sense of nostalgia, yearning, and loss in these images—qualities that evoke old family snapshots.”
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