Remember last year when Google did a pilot program for their Cr-48 Chromebook and shipped a bunch of them to people who signed up to test the product in exchange for merely providing feedback? Google might be revisiting that trick, this time with a pair of heads-up display (HUD) glasses.
In case you’re wondering what HUD glasses are or even look like, they’re basically computers for your face. Remember in the Terminator movies how there’s always a dramatic cut-away to give you the Terminator’s point-of-view and you see all of this red-screened data buzzing around and analyzing stuff? That’s pretty much what you’d see, except without all the “Kill John Connor” bits. And it wouldn’t actually be in your eyes, but just projected onto the lens of the glasses. I think. At any rate, my best guess is that the HUD display you’d see through the glasses looks a little something like this:
And not this:
The folks over at 9to5Google got the low-down from someone who claims to have gotten a glimpse of these warlocks. Their source said that the glasses looked similar to these Oakleys:
From their same source, the 9to5 crew says that the HUD display only appears for one eye and that a user would navigate the user-interface by tilting your head to scroll and click.
This all sounds like some super fascinating sci-fi technology leaking out of Google’s top secret Google X labs, where all sorts of mysterious things are rumored to be afoot. If Google’s going to issue some of these specs out into the public so that they can be test-driven, and as long as you don’t mind wearing some big sporty glasses, you might be able to sign up for the beta program in the future should 9to5Google’s hunch prove correct.
Here’s the question, though: would anybody actually wear these? And if so, why would you wear these? I’m asking as part of my journalistic duty but I’m also personally curious what people expect to get out of these. Don’t any of you think they look, like… huge and clunky? Additionally, anybody else noticing a growing trend of wearable computables?