Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Glass Explorer Edition: Explained!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here we are back, and this is google glass now something that a lot of people ask when you know you go out and walk around with this thing on your face, a lot of people ask the same set of questions, one. What is glass, what is that thing on your face? Two: what does it do and three? What does it look like while you’re wearing it? What do you see through glass so without any further ado? Let’S go ahead and take a look first of all this here. This exact model that we’re looking at is the explorer edition of google glass. That’S a bit more important than a lot of people realize. Basically, this is not the final version of the product.
There will be an evolution in software and hardware before an actual consumer edition. Is created, in fact, there’s been several software updates already, but for now the explorer edition is a limited edition, early version for people willing to go out and explore and give feedback for google about glass aesthetically. It’S a pretty interesting little device because it sits on your face like a regular pair of glasses, but well, there are no actual lenses. There’S no glass in google glass, except for this prism here and the other thing about it. That’S different is it’s asymmetrical, so typically, when you’re wearing glasses, there’s the same thing on both sides with glass, all the smartphone components and all the things in google glass that make it what it is, are all on your right hand, side now, while glass does have Mostly smartphone insides, what it doesn’t have is a cellular radio, which means it can’t connect to data by itself. So what it does do is connect to either wi-fi or bluetooth tethering to your smartphone and connect to the my glass app on your android or ios device, and that’s very important, because without it you wouldn’t be able to do anything on glass. Unless you had a device with you connected to it, so this is really what’s going to power glass and make it do all that it does when it connects to the internet and pulls any sort of data. So how does it actually look to be looking through the actual prism in google glass? Well, google says that it’s supposed to look approximately like a 25-inch display from 8 feet away.
So if you have a 25 inch, computer monitor back up your chair, roll back 8 feet away and that’s about what it’ll look like now. It’S obviously not an hd display, in fact it’s around 640 by 360., but the idea here is that this is all that you look at when you interface with google glass. So it’s pretty important. Essentially, it’s a square that is fixed in the upper right side of your vision.
It’S not in the corner. It’S not totally crazy, like hard to reach stretch with your eye as bad, but it’s definitely out of the way. So it’s not going to be intruding. Your vision, all the time so looking through the prism it’ll, look about like that.
That’S about right! So when wearing glass, natively glass by itself can do seven things with it, you can do seven things. You can take a picture record. A video navigate somewhere send a message, call someone hangouts and google. Let’S not forget that this is the like.
We said the explorer edition of google glass, not the final consumer version, so the list of things that it can do is limited. But the idea here is that this is a new form factor. This is the beginning of a new sort of paradigm.
We have android phones, that’s one form factor. We have android tablets, that’s another form factor we’ll have a whole bunch of smart watches. Soon, that’s another form factor glass, which is a wearable tech on your face, is a totally different form factor so think of this, as sort of like an android phone with no apps on it out of the box, it can do you know a sort of core Set of functions and that’s normal for an android phone, that’s a small list of things it can do out of the box, but once you add an app store once you add the connectivity that a whole bunch of developers and a developer army kind of support that List of things is going to get a lot longer and a lot more interesting.
There are a few officially supported third party apps right now for glass. You know twitter facebook, there’s a new york times app for sort of pop-up news alerts, but in the glass explorer community, there’s a whole bunch of developers doing their thing and making a ton of different apps for glass. And, of course, when there’s a final release, where pretty much anyone can develop for it and anyone can buy it, that sort of mainstream apps are kind of a no-brainer expect to see a youtube app an instagram app. These kind of things are pretty much, undoubtedly going to come to glass when it’s finally available for everyone, but back to those seven things. Those seven functions of google glass are really not all that different from the core functions of an android phone without any apps installed.
If you bought a nexus 4 and never used anything in the play, store, you’d get a pretty similar list of things that you can do with it out of the box. But again like we said this is the explorer edition. Many more things are going to be added now for a brief rundown of these seven okay, i’m going to go through all seven of these things. First of all, all these things are going to be done with an interaction with the trackpad on the side of glass. So there’s a swipe forward backward down and a tap, and this actually feels pretty natural with the sort of light tapping you’re not really bashing it against your own head, but you’re just doing slight slip, swipes and light taps, and things like that, and that feels normal Number one you can take pictures, so you can say: okay, glass, take a picture or if you don’t want to do that at all, you can just tap that photo button.
That’S on the top of glass and i just took a picture of you, the camera and the light. So that’s what you look like right now and if i want to take a video, that’s the next function of glass. Of course, you can say: ok, glass, record a video and you’ll start recording a video or you can actually hold down the photo button on the top of glass and you automatically start taking a 10 second video. So you’re going to start looking at what i’m seeing, which is basically a bunch of lights and a microphone but uh yeah.
That’S what it looks like to take a video with glass. It’S automatically going to take a 10 second video. So if you want to extend it, you have to tap the photo button again and you’ll, get like an unlimited recording time until, like the battery dies, until you stop recording the photo and video quality are really pretty good, and this is one of the defining features Of what makes glass so special, because it’s basically a first person look at what someone’s actually doing now, it’s a little bit above your field of vision. So if you’re, like handheld gaming or something like that, you kind of have to look down a little bit to get it in your field of view.
I found the most part, though most of the things that i do with glass are pretty amazing and you would never be able to get any sort of camera angle like that uh doing anything else, especially because you have both your hands free, which is cool. The video quality is also really good, because it’s such a wide angle lens, it uses very similar optics that the galaxy nexus did, but that doesn’t stop it from being uh really quite good, and also the photos that i took again from that first person view were Really good because it takes a burst of, i think 10 different shots of a bunch of different exposures and gets a really nice high, dynamic range shot and again. That, combined with the wide angle, makes it look a lot like what you would see out of the human eye, so it’s really really close to first person view of what regular people look at. So the third thing glass does is walking directions, driving it’s just navigation with google maps, so you can say: okay, glass, get directions to and then say wherever you want to go b, h, for example, and it’ll, give you the directions and an actual real-time arrow where You would be going on glass with you know the directions to where you’re going.
You can do walking navigation, biking, navigation and driving navigation, and i think this is actually probably the most awesome of the built-in features in class, because, if you’re in an unfamiliar place – and you don’t really know where you’re going – you move your head around, you get to See the exact direction of the orientation of the arrow change and you can just literally follow the arrow in glass to get where you’re going and that’s really powerful stuff. Now, four on five, you can send a message or place a call using glass and that’s because it’s tethered to your phone with the myglass app. So you have a certain list of your starred contacts that you can dial whenever you want.
So you can say: okay, glass, send a message to john i’ll, be late. I’M in traffic, see you in 20 minutes or ok, glass, call john and it’ll start calling that person. So you have to have that person start already in order to make a call to them. Otherwise it would be kind of crazy to search through your whole android contacts library, but that’s pretty cool hands-free. You could be.
You know totally. You know busy with your hands and not have any sort of control over your smartphone and still place a call cell under send a message if it’s important and number six last but definitely not least, is the google search and google. Now now you guys already know how google search works. So i can say: okay, glass, google, how long is the golden gate bridge and you guys already know basically how google search works, but it’ll read the answer back to me. The golden gate bridge is 8980 feet.
Uh 2737 meters – if that matters to you, so you already know how that works, and it works the same way that it does with google now on your phone. But google, now on your phone, also gives you sort of predictive search results and gives you relative relevant information. Wherever you go, glass will do the same thing, so you can swipe through the glass interface and view all this information where you’ll need to know. You know either whether, where you are some uh translation data, if you’re in a different country, all kinds of different, crazy things, the same way google now on your phone would do, but the bottom line with the glass explorer edition is this: this is not the final Version this is not where you’re going to be able to buy in a few weeks or months when there’s a final version available. The final version is going to have updated, hardware is going to have updated software and it’s going to have an updated price, because right now the explorer edition costs fifteen hundred dollars in the united states for all glass explorers. Hopefully it’ll be nowhere near fifteen hundred dollars. When it’s finally mass produced it’ll, hopefully be uh way less than half of that, but go ahead and leave what you would pay for.
Google glass like this in the comments section below that like button, i feel like a lot of people would probably max out at around 500 – maybe less – maybe 400 or 300, but we don’t know what the price is going to be. But this is a google glass explorer edition i’ll have more videos on this to come. I have a lot more content that i want to show you guys regarding glass and a whole bunch of other tech stuff.
But if you enjoyed this, one definitely feel free to give a thumbs up below and be sure to subscribe, to see more glass coverage and more tech. Videos like this. Thank you for watching and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace you .