Editor’s note: For the full Glass experience, check out Anthony’s (@anthonyslai) prologue and week before Glass posts.
I was finally able to pick up the Glass the day right before Jake and Noel came to the Bay Area. It was also the Sunday before Google IO. I got out of the Glass garage at Google in 10 minutes. The Google product manager who fitted me thought I should be the fastest person who got out of the door, as I already knew everything. When I got back home, I figured out an issue. There were couple dead pixels in the Glass. Dead pixels were hard to detect, as they were white in color, and you could only see them in dark places. I called the Glass support right away, and they were nice enough to offer me a replacement. It did seem to be a very common issue with Glass, as there were other people having the same problem as well.
The first night with Glass was a bit of a sleepless night. I went ahead and did all kinds of experiments with it. Glass does not come with a launcher for native Android applications installed. There is also no Play Store that comes with it. In order to start working on native apps, I installed an app called Launchy, which was built by Mike DiGiovanni. I then tested out building some simple native apps to work with Glass. As Glass provides 12 GB of free space at your disposal, you can pretty much do anything with it. As expected, I was able to do almost everything as with other Android device.
I also created my own Glass service using Google App Engine. With the starter project Google provided , it was a breeze. However, in order to get allow Glass users to access it, you must be a Glass Explorer and being white-listed by Google to turn on the Mirror API service in the Google API Console. With the starter project, you can interact with Glass by sending cards to the timeline of a specific user or broadcast it to all users using your service. A contact card of your service will also be created so that the user can interact with your service by replying, posting to the contact. Your service would also be able to receive location updates regarding your users’ locations. There are quite a lot of things you can do with these features. At the same time, these are currently the only things you can do with Mirror API, so it can be quite limited as well, depending on your application.
When I woke up the next morning, somehow I could see everything clearly. Apparently I forgot to take off my contact lenses before going to bed. It had been a long time since I forgot doing so. It reminded me this image, which did somewhat reflect the reality.
