Giving marketers (and rivals) time to catch their breath, Google has recently been streamlining services, and, it was thought, even sidelining innovation.
The search giant, however, appears to be developing new Web interface technology, which could prove incredibly disruptive to advertisers’ (and competitors’) current plans.
While highly experimental, Google is building wearable heads up displays -- or HUDs -- a source tells 9to5Google. “They are in late prototype stages of wearable glasses that look similar to thick-rimmed glasses that ‘normal people’ wear,” it writes. “However, these provide a display with a heads up computer interface.”
“Similar in concept to the glasses worn by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the ‘Terminator’ movies, the high-tech specs purportedly would tap into Google's cloud-based location services to convey details about the user's surroundings,” writes CNet. “The visual information would then appear as a 3D-augmented reality computer display.”
“Would you look at the world through Google Glasses?” asks ReadWriteWeb. “If you did, what would you see? That may be an option soon.”
“As if you weren’t addicted to the Internet already,” Forbes jokes, adding: “Google, of course, already offers an augmented reality application to smartphone users. Google Goggles layer data from Google’s servers over an image taken by the phone’s camera and display an enhanced image to a user.”
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that both Google and Apple were hard at work on “wearable computers,” while it is believed that Apple is more focused on voice-recognition-ready wristwatch-like gadgets.
One of Apple’s ideas, for instance, is a curved-glass iPod that would wrap around a consumers’ wrist, and could be used to communicate using Siri, Apple’s artificial intelligence software.