Google Glass worth $1500: How it works

BANGALORE, INDIA: Google Inc expects to roll out a consumer version of its electronic eyewear that can live stream images and audio and perform computing tasks in less than two years, though it stopped short of putting a price tag on the "smart" glasses.

Google Glass, as the technology is known, will be sold to consumers at a price "significantly" lower than the $1,500 that the company is selling it to U.S.-based software developers from early next year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.

Brin showed off the glasses at Google's annual developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, providing the most in-depth public look at the futuristic technology since Google first announced the project in April.

Google Glass is a stamp-sized electronic screen mounted on the left side of a pair of eyeglass frames which can record video, access email and messages, and retrieve information from the Web.

How do the glasses work? "The graphics are not going to look like they're floating out in front of you, because it's only being displayed to one eye," says Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist and author of The Vision Revolution.

Instead, the experience would be similar to "seeing through" the image of your own nose, which hovers semi-transparently in the periphery of our visual field at all times (even though we rarely pay attention to it).

"Having non-corresponding images coming from each eye is actually something we are very much used to already," Mark Changizi says. "It's not uncomfortable." So Google's one-eyed screen design seems biologically savvy.

Then again, Changizi continues, "they're presenting text to you, and in order to discern that kind of detail, you need to have it in front of your fovea"–the tiny, central part of your visual field.

"That's typically 'not' where we're used to 'seeing through' parts of our own bodies, like our noses." Which means that those crisp, instant-message-like alerts won't be as simple to render as the video makes it seem.

"The more natural place to put , especially if it's not text, is in the parts of your visual field where your face-parts already are," Changizi says. This could be in the left and right periphery, where the ghost-image of your nose resides, or in the upper or bottom edges of your visual field, where you can see your cheeks when you smile or your brow when you frown.

"There could be very broad geometrical or textural patterns that you could perceive vividly without having to literally 'look at' them," he says. This would also make the digital overlays "feel like part of your own body," rather than "pasted on" over the real world in an artificial or disorienting way.

In a high-octane demonstration of the technology, several skydivers wearing the glasses jumped out of an airship and landed on the roof of San Francisco's Moscone Center, sharing a live video of the stunt with the crowd.

Reporters at a briefing after the conference lined up to try on Brin's personal pair of glasses, where they were able to watch a video of fireworks displayed on the small screen. The perspective in the video shifted as wearers moved their heads to look up, down or sideways.

The glasses, which weigh less than some sunglasses, contain a wireless networking chip and essentially all the other technology found inside a typical smartphone - save for a cellular network radio - Google executives said.

The battery is smaller than a smartphone battery, but Google is working on ways to make the battery charge last for a full day.

Brin said he expects the glasses to be available to consumers less than a year after the developer version is available.

Google is still experimenting with various aspects of the glasses, including potentially providing directions on the screen and the ability to have the glasses speak out text messages, Brin said.

He said, in response to a question, that there are no plans to offer any kind of advertising on the device.