20:55
Nitish Kalan
While wearing a pair, you can see directions to your destination appear literally before your eyes. You can talk to friends over video chat, take a photo or even buy a few things online as you walk around.
These glasses can do anything you now need a smartphone or tablet computer to do — and then some.
Google gave a glimpse of "Project Glass" in a video and blog post this week. Still in an early prototype stage, the glasses open up endless possibilities — as well as challenges to safety, privacy and fashion sensibility.
The prototypes Google displayed have a sleek wrap-around look and appear nothing like clunky 3-D glasses. But if Google isn’t careful, they could be dismissed as a kind of Bluetooth earpiece of the future, a fashion faux-pas where bulky looks outweigh marginal utility.
In development for a couple of years, the project is the brainchild of Google X, the online search-leader’s secret facility that spawned the self-driving car and could one day send elevators into space.
If it takes off, it could bring reality another step closer to science fiction, where the line between human and machine blurs.
"My son is 4 years old, and this is going to be his generation’s reality," said Guy Bailey, who works as a social media supervisor for a university outside Atlanta. He expects it might even be followed by body implants, so that in 10 years or so you’ll be able to get such a "heads-up display" inside your head.
"There is a lot of data about the world that would be great if more people had access to as they are walking down the street," said Jason Tester, research director at the nonprofit Institute For the Future in Palo Alto, Calif.
That said, "once that information is not only at our fingertips but literally in our field of view, it may become too much."
