These aren't the type of glasses you buy at a drugstore and I doubt they will ever protect your eyes from the sun or help you read fine print in a dimly lit room. In actuality, they aren't meant to enhance seeing at all but to augment and improve upon the ways in which we view the world we live in.
It's called Project Glass and at first glance it seems that the most exciting feature of the glasses is their ability to record footage from a first person perspective. But take a look at this video and you'll see that Google has bigger plans for these fancy little computerized bifocals:
The whole experience of wearing a computer on your head strikes me as Terminator-esque and it is worrisome that with this unfathomable abundance of information on the Internet literally an eye twitch away there will no room left for anonymity. It's not that I have much to hide but having a world's worth of information at hand can lead to feelings of god-like omnipotence. However, on the flip side, I will be much more inclined to slap on some makeup before I make even a brief trip to the grocery store for fear of horrible pictures of me ending up on Facebook or Google Hangout.
Despite the fear of change and the dubious joy of venturing into uncharted territory that this technology is likely to illicit, the benefits of Google's new glasses are already starting to surface through Project Glass.
Clothing designer Diane Von Furstenberg wore a prototype of Google's goggles during her show at New York Fashion Week this past September.
While I'm not particularly savvy in the world of fashion, this video represents a sampling of ways Project Glass can provide a unique form of first person reporting not ever before achieved.
As a professional nerd, I began to muse how interesting it would be to incorporate Project Glass into a visual medium, comparable to fashion, such as comic books. Placing Google Glass on an artist at a Comic Convention or even at home while they render drawings would be a fascinating intimate insight on what it would look like to create art from inception to final product.
In a world dominated by computerized applications designed to make life more efficient to navigate, I believe the possibilities for the kind of technology the Google Glasses can offer to be as endless and strange as the human imagination. And finally, I would like to encourage Google to thank Gene Roddenberry somewhere along the way for the great idea.
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