Google (News - Alert) introduced its Glass project in the summer of 2012 and now the company has provided a status update on the development of the project.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, Glass is an augmented reality head-mounted display, in this case a pair of smart glasses, that the user wears while relevant information pulled from the Internet is displayed on the screen of the eyewear.

Babak Parviz, the head of the Google Glass project, stated in an interview with IEEE Spectrum that the development of the project is coming along and that the company continues to try out new ideas concerning both hardware and software.

"We are constantly looking for new ways of how this platform can be used," Parviz said. "We're also trying to make the platform more robust. This includes making the hardware more robust and the software more robust, so we can ship it to developers early this year."


Image via www.google.com

Parviz commented that there have been some issues along the way that have interfered with getting the project into the hands of developers quickly, including significant power drain caused by video applications as well as design related difficulties.

If Google can get the kinks worked out, there will be significant potential to the Glass concept.

“We want to have a device that would see the world through your eyes and allow you to share that view with other people. The other big goal was to have a technology that would allow people to access information very, very quickly. So when you have a question, you can very rapidly get to the answer.”

Some new features have been added to Glass since the company's last update. A new touch pad has been included as well as support for both vocal and gesture commands. Google first debuted the special eyeglasses prototype at its I/O Conference in June 2012. Google engineers hope to have the product commercialized by early 2014.

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