Google Glass Developers Strive for Hit Apps

When Google first introduced Glass over a year and a half ago, one question loomed: what kind of apps could make it worth wearing a head-mounted computer everywhere you go?

There's still no good answer for that, in part because Glass is still not publicly available; it is expected to be released sometime this year. However, a select group of developers have had Glass in their hands (and on their heads) for months, and the apps they're developing hint at what they think will make Glass — and other head-worn computers — a mainstream hit.

Some of these apps seek to make technology less distracting (for the wearer, at least, since Glass is hard to ignore on someone's face). Others focus on activities that may be better suited for a computer on your face than a smartphone or a laptop.

Satish Sampath and Kenny Stoltz have created an app called Moment Camera that takes advantage of Glass's five-megapixel camera. The app takes pictures every few seconds when it detects the presence of faces. It uses Glass's accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass to figure out the most opportune time to snap a shot, and later uploads the photos to a remote server and sort outs the ones it believes are the best. "Glass has this sort of built-in awareness that a phone that's in your pocket or sitting face-down on a table doesn't have," Stoltz says.

The benefit is that people would not have to stop what they are doing to take pictures themselves, Stoltz says: "We want to give people back attention."

A similar idea motivates Georgia Tech professor Thad Starner, who is the technical lead on Glass for Google, as he develops an app called Captioning on Glass. It will transcribe the words that someone speaks into a smartphone onto the Glass display of someone with impaired hearing. "By having a head-up display, the wearer can stay 'in the flow' of the conversation, attending the other person's face to get as much information as possible while speeding the natural conversation," he wrote recently for Wired.

While many apps are being newly built for Glass, a number of developers see Glass as an even better way to present apps they previously developed for smartphones, chiefly because its display — equivalent to a 25-inch high-definition display seen from eight feet away — is hands-free and can be ever-present.

For more detail : http://mashable.com/2014/01/02/google-glass-developer-apps/