BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Google Glass Might Have You Taking Photos With A Wink

This article is more than 10 years old.

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Google Glass, Google's new eyeglass mounted computing device, poses a control problem. There's no way to get a Qwerty keyboard in there, and using a touchscreen with your eyes would start to hurt in a hurry. A virtual keyboard would be one thing for stationary computing -- we can also assume that there will be some sort of eye-tracking and well as voice controls.  Astute Reddit user fodawim found something else while he dove into the code for the Android companion app: apparently, Google Glass will be trained to recognize winking.

Winking could be useful to Google Glass for one big reason: people don't do it very often. Or at least, they didn't before they got Google Glass. I could see winking becoming something like a left click for Google Glass, leading to hordes of people with computers strapped to their heads, winking and darting their eyes around like crazy people. It will certainly make a lot of social interactions more awkward, though anyone with Google Glass probably already knew that.

Could something like this rewrite the meaning of the wink in technologically inclined society? Instead of being a coy, knowing gesture, it could come to mean something like: "that's something worth taking a picture of." Just as we needed a whole new set of etiquette rules for when people started carrying around tiny computers in their pockets, so will we need one when people start having omni-present computers on their heads. any extensive eye tracking controls might even mean that we'll need slightly stronger micro-muscles to move those orbs around.

Most of us can only guess what the experience of Google glass is going to be like, but it's more than idle speculation for many. A select few have already been given the chance to spend $1,500 on Google Glass, and a mass market rollout is on the horizon, albeit unannounced.  Little details like this remind us that this isn't a matter of taping a smartphone to some glasses -- this is an entirely different vision of computing, and the jury is still out on whether or not the public at large will want to make the jump.

via Engadget