Google Glasses are (almost) here. Better get used to it.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Google glasses may still be on the fringes of mainstream consciousness. But they are not going to stay there very long.
It’s one of the longest and most anticipated product rollouts in recent memory (the $1,500 Internet-connected eyewear won’t be widely available for months yet). And the product tease is working for Google Glass.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the product’s most famous beta tester, turned the product launch into performance art by introducing the world to Project Glass during a skydiving stunt last year at Google’s annual developer conference in San Francisco.
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Even in the star-studded affair that is the Oscars, he made a spectacle of himself showing off a pair.
Now Google glasses are being spotted all over SXSW. (Of course, Google is also showing off its new talking shoe too.)
Tweeted Keith Kurson: “I’ve seen so many people walking around #sxsw wearing google glass. It’s kind of creepy. I also want a pair.”
Which kind of sums up the general feeling about Google Glass. Wow, these sought-after glasses seem so cool, and yet it’s a bit of a fashion challenge to look cool wearing them.
This ultranerdbro found that out the hard way. He just got his six seconds of Twitter fame for picking up this girl courtesy of the Verge’s Ellis Hamburger.
Not hard to see how people have already begun obsessing over the privacy implications. (Google says social norms will develop over time.) Which was the perfect opening for a well-timed publicity stunt: Check out this Seattle bar that banned Google Glasses.
Perhaps the funniest spoof on Google glasses yet? Photoshopping them onto historical figures (and rich girls with problems on ‘Downton Abbey’). Don Draper pulls off the geeky look as only he can (even without Warby Parker).
But as New York magazine’s Kevin Roose so aptly put it: “Unfortunately for our SXSW Googler and other early adopters, ‘Okay, Glass, now make these glasses look cooler than a Bluetooth earpiece’ is not yet a recognizable command.”
Well played, Mr. Roose.
ALSO:
Sergey Brin talks Google Glass
Google in talks with Warby Parker for its glasses
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