Having titillated the rumour mills throughout 2012, it hasn’t taken the Google experts too long to breathe life into their worst kept secret. The Glass project is soon to hit the market.
Pairing an augmented reality display with some questionable (but multi-coloured) frames, Google’s glasses seem destined to bring on-the-go productivity and connectivity to all new heights. It’s all sounding pretty good. Well, unless you’re an Apple addict, anyway. So, has our inter-connected future gone hands-free?
Perhaps not immediately. With developer-only models currently shipping for around $1500 dollars, the “glass effect” is likely to be top-down to begin with, until market forces drive the prices down over time. But is this a deliberate ploy by the Internet giant? We’ve got two theories on the matter…
Google are deliberately targeting the elite
Let’s face it – the glasses will never be as “sexy” as your brand new titanium D&G frames. In fact you might look a bit like a 1993-style cyborg wearing the initial model. So by pricing the initial(initial in here twice!) models at the elite, “rich geeks” of the world, are Google attempting to make a clunky and indulgent piece of tech become desirable on a larger scale (presumably in time for a mass-market price reduction)?
On top of that, the fact that Glass allows you to record and share your life with a simple voice command may be terrifying for some. So there’s nothing like some ringing high-profile endorsements to reassure the average punters that Glass is nothing to be scared of. If you ask us, it’s a decent scheme. Assuming it is a scheme, that is. This is where our second theory comes into play…
Google Glass costs so much… just because it does
For all our conjecture, there’s no escaping the fact that the Google glasses are interactive screens, for your face. They make smartphones look positively analogue. But that kind of tech costs a lot to develop and presumably just as much to buy. Until a market boom gathers such momentum that it allows Google to slash the price of Glass, we’re going to have to accept that in order to use their latest tech, we’re going (we’re going in twice) how about ‘we’ll just have to pay for it!to have to pay for it.
We’ve done the same in the past – enduring the escalating prices of new Apple products and watching as the market follows suit. It follows (follows in twice….)that, for tech that surpasses even the iPad and Galaxy Tab, we’re going to have to fork out more. (Haven’t we just made this point?)
Eventually though, it’s likely that we’ll all be living our lives through a lens. (Good line!) The future may be a tad Orwellian, but it’s also looking pretty darned cool. As an agency, we can’t wait to give Glass a go…
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