Google Glass – The future is here, or at least around the corner

If you thought that there couldn’t be any more tech gadgets to surprise you and leave you a bit flabbergasted, think again. Enter Google Glass. Google Glass is a wearable computer using an optical head-mounted display that is being developed by Google within their plan Project Glass, with a mission of producing a “mass-market ubiquitous computer”. Yes, that does sound like a term from an ominous sci-fi movie.

Google Glass displays information in a smartphone manner with a hands-free design that can interact with the wearer using voice commands. The frames do not have lenses fitted to them at the moment, but Google is considering partnerships with sunglass retailers like Ray-Ban and may also open retail stores to allow customers to try on the device. The Explorer Edition cannot currently be used by people who wear prescription glasses, but Google has confirmed that Glass will soon be able to be attached to prescription lenses. 

Glass is still very much a prototype, even after 8 months of testing and developing. The first thing noticed about Glass is the cube-shaped glass prism that sits above the right eye. It has a 640 x 360 resolution and hangs just out of the way of the wearer's line of sight. For the wearer, the display has to be viewed by pointing the eyes up and to the right – which possibly could look strange and cause major headaches – and acts as a much larger screen; one that's equal to a 25-inch High Definition television.

There are about 8 thousand "Explorers" currently – a group of engineers, scientists, artists, and journalists in the U.S. – who were allowed to buy and test Glass for about $1500, about R15 000. At the Glass office in New York, they got a crash course on how to connect Glass to the Internet, take videos, snap photos, get directions, perform Google searches, return e-mails, make calls, and much more. And all this using just your voice with an instruction that begins with “Okay, Glass.”

Google Glass is still in its developmental stage but is expected to be released in the latter part of 2014. But don’t get too excited. The cost of Glass is likely to be pretty exorbitant until Google finds a way to mass produce it and make it accessible to those masses. And that’s not the only downside to Glass. This could potentially be one of the most disruptive pieces of technology to be invented in current years and has also become a regular subject in legal circles around the U.S. But whatever may come of Google Glass, the development of the technology is fascinating and mind-boggling and will most likely become “ubiquitous” just as Sergey Brin and his Google guys want it.

The guys who give us Google – Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt

The names Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin, Lawrence "Larry" Page and Eric Emerson Schmidt might not be familiar to you but the name Google definitely is. The Internet unquestionably changed the way we see the world, pun intended, but Google, one of the most profitable Internet companies, gave us access to that world.

Sergey Brin is a Russian-born computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google. As of 2013, his personal wealth was approximated to be $24.4 billion. Presently Brin and Page own about 16 percent of the company. He emigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union as a child and later obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying Mathematics and Computer Science. After graduating, he enrolled in Stanford University, one of the most-renowned universities in the States, to acquire a PhD in Computer Science. There he met Larry Page, not knowing that their friendship would give the world one of the best inventions of all time.

Larry Page was born in Michigan, in the U.S. A lot like Brin, Page’s father, Carl Page, earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1965 when the field was still new and being built. Today he is considered a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence. Both he and Page's mother, Gloria, were Computer Science professors at Michigan State University. Page obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan with honours and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University. As of 2013, Page's personal wealth is estimated to be $20.3 billion, ranking him number 13 on the Forbes 400 list of the 400 richest Americans.

At university, Brin and Page had filled their dormitory room with cheap computers and used a system created by Brin to build a superior search engine. The program became extremely popular at Stanford and they put their PhD studies on hold to start Google in a rented garage. Google began as a privately held company in 1998 with their mission statement being "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and its unofficial slogan being "Don't be evil". Brin and Page were really legends from the very beginning.

Eric Schmidt came onto the Google scene a little later. He is an American software engineer who is currently the Executive Chairman of Google. Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 138^th richest person in the world with an estimated wealth of $8.3 billion in 2013. He attended Princeton University where he started as an Architecture major but switched majors to earn a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1976. Initially, Schmidt was recruited by Brin and Page as Google’s CEO but in January 2011, Google announced that he would step down but continue as the Executive Chairman of the company and act as an adviser to co-founders Page and Brin. Page replaced Schmidt as the CEO of Google in April 2011.

These guys, who have given the world something that most people would not be able to live without, started off with a dream and lots of hard work. Page had said in an interview that from a very early age he realized that he wanted to invent things. So he became really interested in technology and business. And from when he was 12 years old, he knew that he was going to start a company eventually. Who could’ve known that that company would be Google? Today, Google is perhaps one of the largest and most important Internet corporations and probably will be for a long time to come. It offers online productivity software including email (Gmail), an office suite (Google Drive), and social networking (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing, organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome OS for the netbook known as a Chromebook. A small start in a rented garage became all this. Never curse the day of small beginnings.