Google's AR Glasses May Come to Consumers within 12 Months of Developer Version

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Besides all the hullabaloo about the new Nexus 7 tablet and Android 4.1/Jelly Bean, there are some other cool things going on at Google I/O this year. Google went to a lot of trouble to show off the newest version of their augmented reality glasses, aka Project Glass and Google Goggles. Several Google devs from the Project Glass team even jumped out of airplanes to show off the device. As we reported previously, Google is already making developer editions of the glasses available for $1500 bucks. However, some new info has emerged regarding the new tech. Supposedly, Google intends to make a consumer edition of the glasses available within twelve months. Here's a quote with some more details,

That consumer version will be “significantly” cheaper than the Explorer Edition prototype hardware, Google co-founder and Glass project lead Sergey Brin told TechCrunch, though this won’t be a race to the bottom.

Instead, the team responsible for Glass has said, the priority will be balancing quality and affordability. No indication of what sort of final price will be settled upon has been given, but wearable eyepiece specialists have already – and separately – estimated that augmented reality headsets of Google Glasses’ ilk will most likely come in at around the $200-500 mark.

In the meantime, Google will be counting on developers to get up to speed with Glass. The cloud-based API they will have use of will be “pretty far along” by the time the Explorer Edition goes on sale, and Google’s own engineers are already testing Gmail, Google+ and other Android apps on the wearable.

As for battery life, Brin was overheard suggesting he had seen six hours of use from a charge, though it’s unclear what settings were enabled at that time. It’s already been confirmed that Glass will be able to locally cache content rather than upload it immediately, or indeed stream low-quality footage while

Who wants one?

Source: SlashGear

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