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Weekly Roundup: Pebble Steel review, Google Glass prescription frames and more!
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Google Glass now has games
Google Glass, the latest in wearable tech/sci-fi eyewear of the future/thing that will make people look at you like you are a crazy person because you are talking to yourself, now has mini-games. Available to download and play now are Tennis, Balance, Clay Shooter, Matcher and Shape Splitter. Tennis is, well, tennis, but the other games are a bit different. Balance has you using Glass' gyroscope to try and balance virtual books on your head, Clay Shooter is more or less a first-person shooter (emphasis on the first-person) where you blast clay targets, Matcher is a memory game of matching identical tiles, and Shape Splitter is a quasi-Fruit Ninja game where you, yes, split shapes. Of course, these aren't the most robust of gaming experiences, but they don't have to be. These introductory games could entice other developers into building new experiences for Glass users, and that's going to be important as Google moves forward with the technology. After all, who wants cool futuristic tech if it's not fun?
Daily Roundup: camera with gun-like sight, Nintendo execs take pay cut, and more!
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Daily Roundup: prescription frames for Google Glass, Pebble Steel review and more!
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The future of beauty school is Google Glass
At least according to L'Oreal. The hair care giant (and purveyor of giant hair) just announced Matrix Class for Glass, which gives clients and beauty school students a stylists-eye view of your head. The three-part program includes a video series of in-depth beauty tutorials shot with Google's wearable; Matrix Eye for Style, an "exclusive" salon experience provided by George Papanikolas, who will record sessions with the headset; and a series of lessons for beauty professionals given by be-Glassed hair care superstars. This isn't the first or last time L'Oreal has taken advantage of the wearable; it used Glass to document Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in Madrid late last year and has plans to release a Glass app sometime in 2014. It might seem like an odd coupling considering most glass holes are more Super Cuts than Vidal Sassoon, but L'Oreal says there's an intersection between the early adopters of fashion and tech. According to a study done by its partner at Fashion Week, Nurun, "The futuristic nature of Google Glass appealed to the fashion-forward, tech-savvy audience..." When we start seeing years-old issues of Wired replacing copies of Southern Hair at Truvy's, we'll believe it.
Daily Roundup: Google's smart contact lens, President Obama on the NSA and more!
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Daily Roundup: NSA iPhone malware, Mac Pro teardown, this year in reviews and more!
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Google Glass collision detection could one day save you from yourself
Once upon a not so distant time, a woman took a long walk off a short pier while checking her Facebook page. True story. Then there was the time the San Diego police department ticketed a woman for driving while under the influence of Glass. Clearly, we've fallen victim to our technological dependence, not just literally, but also legally and it requires a solution. It's unsurprising then that Google had the foresight to come up with a way to save us from ourselves, at least where its Glass eyewear is concerned. A recently surfaced patent application, dated October 2011, references a "collision-avoidance action" that could help reduce Glass-related mishaps. The technique detailed in the filing doesn't set off any alarms or alerts for Glass users, but it will "[de-emphasize] at least one of the displayed virtual objects" in the HUD to keep you from smashing into glass or walls or telephone polls or other people. You get the point. It does this by gathering data from Glass' sensors and calculating the distance between you, the oblivious party, and potential obstacles in your way. Go ahead and laugh at the absurdity of this all now, but in five year's time when we're all rockin' Glass-like eyewear, you'll be thankful for the heads-up (pun intended). [Original Image credit: RuthMarie/Flickr]
Google Glass update brings The Wall Street Journal, storm warnings and RSS to your face
Sure, you've read The Wall Street Journal, but can you really say you've experienced it until you've experienced it #throughglass? The Dow Jones-published paper is among the latest batch of Glassware apps coming to Google's wearable, letting you keep up on breaking news, politics, business and, of course, technology. Weather Alerts, meanwhile, offers 120 different warning categories, including tornadoes and air quality alerts. Also on the docket is Winkfeed, which brings RSS to the device, letting you read news and save stories to your Pocket account. All of those join the recently announced ability to upload videos to YouTube and take part in Google Hangouts through Glass.
Google expands iOS support for Glass, but pulls MyGlass app
Those Glassholes Google Glass Explorers who are iPhone users have more to be happy about. XE12, the latest Google Glass OS update, gives iPhone users the ability to take part in Google Hangouts through their pricey, yet oh-so-nerdish eyewear. Oh, yeah -- Android users can do that as well now... But wait, there's more! There's now an official YouTube upload capability, an official Glass lock screen, improvements to the Play Music function and -- you're going to love this one -- the addition of the Wink feature. To take a picture with your Google Glass, all you need to do is wink. Creepy, huh? The biggest feature for iPhone users, though, is official Google support for an iOS version of the MyGlass app. The app showed up on the App Store yesterday morning, but was yanked for God-knows-what reason and is expected to be properly intro'd later this week.
Google Glass mod gives you control over home appliances with one touch pairing
The beauty of Glass is that we're just barely scratching the surface of what Google's smart eyewear can, and eventually will, do. Leave it then to the brainiac undergrads at UC Berkeley's CITRIS lab to show us one possible direction that sees the wearables modded for at-home convenience. By adding an IR emitter to the side of Glass, the Berkeley team was able to demonstrate remote control of home appliances by pairing them with an Xbee 802.15.4 WiFi radio and microcontroller. The controls for the setup are simple. A user need only look at the intended appliance to bridge a connection -- made possible by an IR-transmitted device ID -- and view toggles for control. We know what you're thinking: how does Glass select one appliance from a cluster of nearby devices? To accommodate for this hassle, the team's made it so that the heads-up display will show the user a numerical range of selectable devices and a blinking, blue LED on the intended target when pairing is successful. Users can also swap between appliances by swiping down on Glass' touchpad or allowing for a connection timeout. Yes, it's still early days for cumbersome Glass prototypes like this one, but we'd bet the farm you'll be turning on the AC with the blink of an eye before long. You can check out the demo video after the break for proof of this Glass concept.
Google Glass gets unofficial WordPress support
Google Glass may never be able to give you X-ray vision, but its list of supported features continues to grow. PR firm, Weber Shandwick, has released an unofficial plugin for the futuristic eyewear that allows owners to publish content to any WordPress-hosted blog with simple verbal commands. The lucky few with a headset of their own can snap a photo or video, dictate an associated caption and upload their entry, all in less than a minute. Posting long-form content, like your mother-in-law's buffalo chicken dip recipe, is also possible -- but there's a learning curve. Weber Shandwick's SVP of technology innovation, Ozzy Farman, told us that Google's built-in voice-to-text functionality takes a bit of getting used to.
Lumus reveals classy two-tone Glass competitor with in-lens display
Lumus is a heads up display (HUD) manufacturer better known for its military-grade products, some of which have been deployed in US Air Force F-16 and A-10 helmets. Its latest effort, the DK-40 dev kit, is an attempt to steer its tech toward the consumer market. And yes, it looks a lot like Google Glass. But instead of projecting notifications on the outskirts of your peripheral vision, the entire right lens of Lumus' Android-powered eyewear is a 640 x 480 see-through display. The DK-40 also includes a motion sensor and 5-megapixel camera necessary for a true AR experience. Though its sleek design is more socially acceptable than its fighter pilot headgear, Lumus doesn't intend to mass-produce anything just yet. The glasses are still deep in development stages, harboring only 1-2 hours worth of battery life. Instead, the company simply wants to promote the adoption of its lens technology. The entire monocular kit and SDK will debut at CES 2014, but won't ship to OEMs and "select developers" until the end of Q1 2014.
$25 Google Glass hack uses 3D printed webcam mount to let you play Mario with your eyes
We're not entirely sure Google would give the thumbs up to everything detailed in the below video by University of Maryland PhD student, Brandyn White. But hey, any video about Google Glass that includes the phrase "you can even use a banana" will generally pique our interest. There's a lot of cool stuff in the below video, but the long and short of it is a $25 hack involving a webcam mount printed on a Formlabs Form 1 that brings pupil-tracking to Glass's portfolio of control inputs. That means an alternative control method for those times when you can't use your voice (the library, for example) or hands (the common example of climbing a tree while wearing Glass as outlined in the video). Naturally, White uses his newfound abilities to play a bit of Super Mario. That probably would have been our first choice, too, Brandyn.
LeVar Burton on Google Glass: 'It disturbed me'
"It disturbed me. I was skeptical... [and] I'm a person that's very open to technology." That's the reaction LeVar Burton, the man best known from Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation, first had when encountering Google Glass backstage at Engadget Expand. Burton, a self-described edutainment pioneer, acknowledges the disruptive power new technologies can have on media and culture -- after all, he did help transform television into a worthy educational tool/babysitter with his PBS program. But even with that storied success, and his company's current inroads into digital with an iPad Reading Rainbow application, Burton still had a "knee-jerk" response when confronted with Glass. Although his celebrity status and the resulting paranoia could have something to do with it.
Google lines up a new Glass partner for prescription, fashion and sport lenses (updated)
We've known for a while that Google is looking to develop prescription-lens versions of Google Glass, but now its plans are starting to become clear. The search giant has teamed up with Rochester Optical to design and produce "custom prescription, fashion, and sport lenses" for its high-tech wearable. Rochester expects to have them ready by early next year and will include transitions, tinting and matching color wire frames. Google recently announced that Glass Explorers will soon be able to to swap out their headset for a new version, which will work with future shades and prescription frames, helping to make Glass look like something you'd want to wear. If you're interested to see what the eyewear specialist has been cooking up, it'll share its latest designs later today -- we'll make sure to share them with you when they do. Update: According to Google, there is no actual relationship between Google Glass and Rochester Optical.
Google expands Glass sales but still wants a one-to-one chat with every buyer
Gone are the days when you needed to visit a Google office in person to pick up a pair of Explorer Edition spectacles. Following the recent expansion of the wearable project, which allowed existing owners to invite up to three friends or relatives to take that $1,500 step into the future, it's been possible for new customers to have their glasses shipped to them, just like any commercial product. What hasn't changed, however, is Google's desire to influence these users' first impressions of the device by giving them a highly personalized introduction. Soon after Phil Nickinson of Android Central received his invite-only Google Glass, he got a phone call asking him to join a personal 45-minute Hangout to take him through the "entire setup process" and tell him "about the history of Glass along the way." These calls are a sensible move on Google's part, no doubt, and likely very helpful to new owners, but they also suggest that Glass may still be a little too complicated to ship with nothing but a Getting Started PDF and a legal disclaimer.
Google reportedly ramping up Glass production, prepping invite system for broader rollout
There's still no firm word on a broader consumer launch, but it looks like Google is now gearing up for what could be the biggest expansion of its Glass Explorer program to date. According to the Financial Times, the company is planning a "substantial" increase in production ahead of the holidays, which could put the wearable computer in the hands (and on the heads) of "tens of thousands" of more users over the coming months. At least some of them will reportedly be able to buy the device through an invite system, which the FT's sources likened to Gmail back in its beta days. Those sources apparently had few other details to share, though, including any indication of a change to that $1,500 price tag.
Google Glass project tackles poverty, other real world problems
Image from charity: water taken with Glass It has flown over San Francisco, adorned the faces of runway models and most recently taken a road trip across the US. Now Google's already iconic wearable computer is taking a more altruistic journey with five non-profit organizations. Starting today, a small selection of Google Giving partners will begin using Glass to help them achieve their organizations' missions and "tackle some complex challenges." It's unclear exactly what the groups will do with Glass, but Google says they will use the device in their daily work to "bring more transparency to philanthropy, and close the gap between donors and the people they support." Participating organizations include The World Wildlife Fund; Samasource, which offers enterprise data services to poor women and youth; Give Directly, an organization with a web-based solution for connecting donors to individual households in Kenya; the all-purpose youth-focused Do Something!; and charity: water, which concentrates on clean water initiatives. Still in early development, the device's cost and lack of functionality have proved prohibitive, and a few socially inconsiderate early adopters have inspired the term glasshole. While Glass is hardly in need of a PR facelift, the Giving Through Glass initiative should shed some light on the wearable's more practical applications.
Daily Roundup: GoPro Hero3+ review, gdgt's best deals, Android KitKat tease and more!
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
