Where is the app from a few years back, where you pointed your phone camera at some text and it switched it with a translated version of it live in-picture ?

Not only did it look awesome, but it would also be a perfect application for google's glass. Imagine, you're in berlin, or tokyo, or madrid, you read the menu in a restaurant and you have the exact translation displayed to you live in the corner of your view ? Or in a museum, etc ..

Word Lens: http://questvisual.com/us/.

I think there is such a feature built in google glass or someone will integrate google goggles into google glass

Not exactly. You have to talk to it in order for it to translate a text. Something like "OK Glass, say something something in Japanese".

I believe they've already integrated Google Goggles into the Google Translate app.

google: winky google glass app

The fireside chat had an interesting moment where they showed Glass on prescriptions glasses, which made them slightly more inconspicuous I thought - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8OUSd8zqT4&feature=youtu...

I like the Sharingan logo, very apropos. In Naruto, the Uchiha clan derives their powers from having special eyes. A three-prong pupil indicates that the bearer unlocked extremely powerful abilities by killing somebody very close to them, usually a best friend.

with google glass you only need to kill your best friends privacy :-)

Saw some people with them at maker faire, you still have to interrupt a conversation to take a picture and whatnot. I'm waiting (read: hacking at it) for Neurosky integration, or at least blink-pattern reading.

I thought winks were the standard way to take pictures with Glass now. At least that's how everyone at Google I/O is doing it and is the feature most people are praising.

Is this what you're looking for: https://github.com/kaze0/winky (wink to take a picture)

There is already a blink sensor that is trivial to access. It also does other eye gestures.

did you see the first cellphones?

Google Glass only needs to get over its initial days in which it is viewed as awkward and then it will be socially acceptable. Unlike the first cellphones, its plainly visible even when you're not using it, and like Bluetooth headsets there's a risk of being perceived as someone not caring about their surroundings.

Even on a forum like Slashdot which is populated by uber-geeks, here's the results of an ongoing poll with ~5000 people voting.

Head-mounted displays / sensors like Google Glass are:

Creepy 1823 votes / 32%

Cool 821 votes / 14%

Ugly 502 votes / 8%

Baffling 323 votes / 5%

Intriguing 1498 votes / 26%

Short-sighted 413 votes / 7%

I've got my own adjective! (Explained in comments.) 208 votes / 3%

http://slashdot.org/poll/2577/head-mounted-displays--sensors...

The 40% positive outlook is still not bad though.

I love the idea of Google Glass and I'd definitely use them if I had them.

But...

> Google Glass only needs to get over its initial days in which it is viewed as awkward and then it will be socially acceptable.

People said that about segway and sinclair C5s and etc etc.

I really hope that Google can manage to make Glass work. Lots of other headmounted displays failed or didn't make it out of very small niches.

I don't think segways and sinclairs provide the utility to make them mainstream. Not 100% sure Google Glass does either but I think the chance is higher.

I think the segway is a good comparison. It had similar hype ("it will change the way cities are designed") and who uses them today: nerds, and obese mall cops.

Unless Glass solves real problems in a way that is compelling to real people, they will remain nerd toys.

For all the discussion of "cool" and whatever, utility certainly seems key.

We can talk about the Segway's coolness all we want, but it's ultimately not that important. Why did the Segway never become more than a niche product? Because it's pretty much useless! It fills a mostly-unwanted niche between walking and bicycles. Most people can walk. Bicycles are cheap. Given how little it does, I can't fathom how one would have looked at a pre-production Segway and thought, wow, I bet these will sell like hotcakes.

Glass is more of a platform than a product right now. The question of what it's for is still mostly unanswered. Find the killer app for it, and all the questions of creepiness or uncoolness will melt away. Fail to find anything useful to do with it, and the lack of coolness will just become an excuse for the fanboys to use.

This can't be the future... Look how cumbersome the glasses are