Google Glass, an invention that may have been ahead of its time, was shunned when it first came out over intrusive privacy concerns. But could one of my favorite ideas of all-time be on the verge of making a comeback?!
Well, it seems that Google’s latest AI advancements, in the form of Project Astra, as part of their push to create AI agents, could be paving the way for eventual integration into consumer products, perhaps even an integration with AR glasses like Google Glass.
Ars Technica sums it up best:
“Just one day after OpenAI revealed GPT-4o, which it bills as being able to understand what’s taking place in a video feed and converse about it, Google announced Project Astra, a research prototype that features similar video comprehension capabilities. It was announced by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on Tuesday at the Google I/O conference keynote in Mountain View, California.
Hassabis called Astra ‘a universal agent helpful in everyday life.’ During a demonstration, the research model showcased its capabilities by identifying sound-producing objects, providing creative alliterations, explaining code on a monitor, and locating misplaced items. The AI assistant also exhibited its potential in wearable devices, such as smart glasses, where it could analyze diagrams, suggest improvements, and generate witty responses to visual prompts.
Google says that Astra uses the camera and microphone on a user’s device to provide assistance in everyday life. By continuously processing and encoding video frames and speech input, Astra creates a timeline of events and caches the information for quick recall. The company says that this enables the AI to identify objects, answer questions, and remember things it has seen that are no longer in the camera’s frame.
While Project Astra remains an early-stage feature with no specific launch plans, Google has hinted that some of these capabilities may be integrated into products like the Gemini app later this year (in a feature called ‘Gemini Live’), marking a significant step forward in the development of helpful AI assistants. It’s a stab at creating an agent with ‘agency’ that can ‘think ahead, reason and plan on your behalf,’ in the words of Google CEO Sundar Pichai.”
But does this mean that Google Glass is actually coming back?! As Google co-founder Sergey Brin puts it:
“While the rise and fall of Google Glass is a story in and of itself, the vision of the product has made a dramatic comeback in recent years thanks to AI tech and the pursuit of finding the best hardware to suit it — whether that be glasses, lapel pins, or orange squares. Brin’s preference? Something that’s hands-free, wearable, and not a phone.”
Glasses perhaps?!
Personally, I believe that AR Glasses are our future. Not phones or other wearables like pins. Whether that’s Google Glass or Meta’s Ray-Bans or the Apple Vision Pro remains to be seen. But it’s clear that we’re going to want something hands free, that’s part of who we are, that can see what we see.
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Is Google Glass poised for a comeback thanks to Project Astra?
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