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Beam Me Up Speccy!

by Dave Porter | 30.05.2013
Google glass image

Don’t be offended by the title now, as a glasses wearer myself, I am merely referring to the bespectacled future of search that is ‘Google Glass’ and the technologies that are being developed for it!

Back in March, our Social Media Director Ben posted about how Google’s Project Glass and Apple’s wristwatch mobile device are set to compare in terms of consumers’ views on the future of mobile connected devices and the route that they are likely to go down. These stats showed that a massive 45% of early adopters preferred the idea of Google Glass over Apple’s wristwatch device, meaning that the majority of us obviously prefer the Cyborg look as opposed to International Spy! Nevertheless, it got me thinking… when you consider how users of these devices may interact with them in their day to day lives, the difference in usability does actually start to become a little more fathomable. Well, a clever techie from Los Angeles (Drew Baumann, Founding Engineer of FullScreen) has developed an app that illustrates exactly this.

Baumann, with the help of his pal Andrew Skotzko, has developed a Facebook app for Google Glass called ThroughGlass. The app gives users the opportunity to create status messages and comments on Facebook without the use of fingers or thumbs or even the need to surreptitiously raise an arm to speak into a watch like James Bond might do. Instead, users can just say what’s on their mind and their comment will be posted directly to Facebook (only those you wish to of course!). Baumann found that voice commands for Glass, or any other mobile device for that matter, are only useful for utility purposes like asking for directions or carrying out a search. What ThroughGlass has been developed to do is to simply take a user’s comment, straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak, and place it directly onto Facebook whilst then allowing them to see in real-time the likes and comments that are received from their friends. Cool huh?

I will leave it up to you to interpret exactly how useful this app might be in everyday social situations but one thing is for sure, the future certainly does look interesting!