Google Glass to Hit Developers' Hands This Month

A couple of ideas. Introduce bugs, so managers wearing Glass in the City pub will see maintenance instructions for cash registers. Make ambient sounds automatically switching on when your boss talks.

I'm not entirely sure of the capabilities of Glass. For instance, battery life and an ability to persistently have the camera on and displaying an overlay for extended periods seems difficult. Some of the Glass ideas I like but haven't heard much discussion over:

- Facial recognition with a little popup over people's heads with their name. Never forget someone's name

- Link in with Facebook or your calendar to have people's pop up indicate if its their birthday. Always be on top of the "Happy birthday!" game

- Have an alternate reality game with digital objects people can place/write on. Only Glass users can see the teddy bear in the corner, and only google glass users can see the giant graffiti wall where people sign their name.

- Identify desired objects and make them stick out, "Dammit, where are my keys again?!"

- Auto translate QR codes and overlay the translation

- Auto tweet images of your life on a schedule

- Many cameras pick up infrared, could overlay this (if the Glass camera does) to expose more of the light spectrum to Glass users

> At least with glass you can keep your eyes facing the road

A sheet of anything, however transparent, centimetres away from your eye won't help you see something a hundred meters away.

You're concerned with alignment but focus matters even more. You usually don't notice the focus time because your eyes are doing it while moving (changing the alignment).

HUDs work in planes and cars because they're far away enough to be in the "far sight" range.

Worse, while once your eye moved the distracting elements are out of the way and you get an unobstructed and non-distractive view, with this you simply can't look away of the distracting elements — merely focus away — and however transparent and blurry it would appear it would still obscure the view.

Besides, the attention problem makes it an order of magnitude more likely to have an accident whereas the hands problem makes it only a factor more. When you're on a call with someone or whatever, hands or not, your mind is simply not driving.

So, should it be a cause of concern? I don't know, but it's certainly not the solution. Driving is an enjoyable yet serious matter, requiring a combination of motor and cognitive skills, therefore the solution is (whether people like it or not) that one should not do anything else but driving, or not drive at all (i.e have someone either drive meanwhile or do the task, or take the train, coach, taxi, or get a Google car). The huge majority of crashes are directly tied to an inadequate level of cognition from the driver (alcohol, testosterone excess, adrenaline addiction, sleep deprivation, psychological pressure, multitasking...) because every dent one makes in its ability to analyse raises the odds of an event ranging from nuisance to dramatic given the energies involved WRT our frail physical envelopes.

So, drive responsibly. Don't answer, dial or text wile driving, and don't put an electronic lid on your eye. Even if you think it's safe while it's probably not, it's way safer not to.

Nah, chances are 100 other people have the same idea. No one is going to steal it. Just build the best version of that idea and don't worry about what everyone else is doing.

Yes, all of these things are already possible to implement, in the same way that it was possible to construct a webpage in which you listed your activities and doings and manually update them -- and track your friends who have their own webpages -- long before Facebook came along.

The idea isn't the point here, it's the ease of use and the visceralness of it. The gun maps debate is a prime example of this. Anyone could go to the government office and get those records. And if you were a thief, you would have much more use out of them as a straight excel spreadsheet which you could cross-reference with other property records...or at least just do quick name searches across a large Excel file.

But as soon as a newspaper put a bunch of red dots on the map (which made it nearly impossible for a user to find anything more than who has a gun and who lives at that red dot without clicking manually thousands of times), the New York state legislature is hot to pass a law to ban those public records.

Usability and location is much more than just "additional features".