Google Inc (GOOG) Still Working Out Kinks with Google Glasses

Six months ago Google Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced what has been called its most ambitious project ever, Google Glass—a titanium-framed glasses headset with video and audio capability.

“We wanted to have a device that would see the world through your eyes and allow you to share that view with other people,” Google’s Babak Parviz told IEEE Spectrum. “The second 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.”

Although the project is still far from consumer release, project lead Parviz recently told IEEE Spectrum the tech giant has been hard at work experimenting with new software ideas and hardware developments for the design.

“We constantly try out new ideas of how this platform can be used,” Parviz told IEEE Spectrum. “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.”

According to Parviz, Google Glasses currently includes a touchpad to change device settings, and the team is also experimenting with voice commands. Parviz and team are also trying out a calling feature that would combine the glasses with mobile phone features, as well as increasing the battery life of the device to last a full day.

Parvis also told IEEE Spectrum Google Inc (GOOG) has no plans to display advertising on Glass devices, and it is yet to be determined if the devices will incorporate apps or an alternative feature.

“This is a complicated thing,” he said. “This is not a laptop or a smartphone. It’s an entirely new platform. So how people interact with it and what people do with it is totally new territory. But we hope that when we ship this to developers, other people will also figure out what this very powerful platform is able to do.”

Initially, Google has no plans to incorporate augmented reality into Google Glasses, according to Parviz, although that may certainly enter the picture in the future.

“Augmented reality is exciting when you think about future generations of this type of wearable computing,” he said.

Google Glasses may release to the consumer market in 2014, although a pilot group of customers may be allowed to try out the product for $1,500 each in the next few months.