Saturday, March 30, 2013

Google is announcing the winners of the Internet Glasses Invitation. Winners responded to a Twitter, and Google Plus promotion held last month by providing a 50 word statement on what they would do with the new RESTful based API technology. Eight thousand people in the U.S. have been picked to test the company's new Internet-connected eye glasses which are expected to sell for between $700 - $1500 but the Google Glasses won't be available to the general public until late this year or early next year.

Winners will pay $1,500 for the Google Glasses and they must be picked up in San Francisco or New York. The winners will help engineers further refine Google Glasses for pubic release.The contest was limited to the US because of "some logistical and regulatory limitations". Google hopes to make the Glass Explorer Program more widely available in the future. At present the Explorer Program is only available to individuals but Google is looking to reach out to business as well, through other channels.

Google Glasses are designed to perform many of the tasks currently being performed with smart phones including email, online social network communication and other apps without having to look down at the a small smart phone screen. The glasses have a built in microphone and respond to voice commands, they have a built in good quality camera and connect to the Internet with a wireless connection. There are some concerns as to privacy issues, seems like it may just be another camera recording our activities without us knowing it.

"Development with Glass is done with something called the Mirror API, which is basically a collection of RESTful Web services," as is explained by Jenny Murphy, a Glass developer programs engineer. REST or Representational state transfer, will provide that Glass-compatible services will integrate with the already familiar PHP, Python, Ruby and or Java programming languages.

The term REST came about when Roy Thomas Fielding described the architecture and in decisions that led to HTTP. In chapter five of his thesis which is available online in a News Release from SateliteMike (one l), Fielding discusses the RESTful state. There is also some great information on DNS in his work. The beauty of REST is that it is a language that works with the architectural design that drives the Web; it works with the web. Implementation of RESTful services in Ruby, can be done with Ruby on Rails, in Java with Restlet, and in Python with Django.

Not much has been said about the Google Glasses hardware other than pictures of the Google Glasses, and perhaps that it is a pack that straps to ones' belt, the good news is that with the release of these Google Glasses winners, more information maybe forth coming.