News Corners

Google is working on digital glasses using augmented reality and its Android technology, reports suggest.

Google’s glasses are reportedly similar in appearance to the Oakley Thump design

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The glasses reportedly integrate augmented reality technology into a new Robocop-style vision of the future, overlaying the screen of the glasses with additional contextual information.

Augmented reality traditionally uses increasingly commonplace technologies to add information to images on the screens of mobile phones and tablets. A digital camera and internet connectivity is combined with location data – so if you point your phone at Big Ben, because the device knows where you are it’s comparatively simple to add information to the image on screen. And while the obvious uses are for, say, historical information, there’s space for advertisers and social services to tell you where to, say, meet up with friends for a drink.

Although Google itself resolutely refused to give any oxygen to rumours of the project, the New York Times reports that the glasses will use the same operating system as Google’s mobile phone, and cost about the same as a top smartphone too.

The search giant is reportedly considering how people might be informed that they are being ‘processed’ by the glasses, but Google’s existing augmented reality software, Google Goggle, focuses on objects rather than individuals.

Scrolling will be with slight inclinations of the head and neck. Perhaps the least plausible part of the story is that, once learnt, such movements are apparently “almost indistinguishable to outside users”.

Augmented reality technology has, however, been growing rapidly in popularity and Google’s ‘secret lab’, codenamed Google X, is known to be working on advanced new projects.