Project Glass, a stylish flavour of augmented reality announced by Google earlier this week. With a Google+ page pronouncing the new project Google may have assumed the technology crowds around the world would applaud their new Uber Gadget.

Sadly Googles latest announcement was met by disbelief, scorn and mocking. Light on technical details while being extremely sleek and futuristic visually Project Glass was initially accused of being a pure demonstration device.

Project Glass as it turns our is a real product, a pair of glasses to be precise that can display information, either specifically requested or relating to the immediate surroundings, augmented reality. At the moment the glasses appear to display information on a small independent display but the ultimate goal is to project onto the inside of the glass, with general messages in their own space and other information overlaid onto the background, giving the full augmented reality effect.

Project Glass: One day…

Many Technoratti lampooned Project Glass after the announcement earlier this week. Viral parody video’s are already doing the rounds, a sure sign of their viral nature, the fact they they have been viewed more times than the original video.

Much of the reason for the roasting could be traced back to the original announcement of Project Glass. Looking more like an infomercial for the new generation of Blue Blockers or X-Ray Vision Specs, Google Glass looked like a very polished piece of vapour-ware, with no mention of the underlying technology Google set the speculation in motion.

Fighting back Sergey Brin took a pair of prototype Project Glass glasses for a spin at a charity event yesterday. The glasses were thin and light, virtually indiscernible from an ordinary pair of sunglasses. Fellow attendees reported that the augmented reality displays weren’t noticeable until Sergey had pointed them out. As Sergey did demonstrate this is a working prototype, still more detail of capabilities and technology would be good.

While the glasses themselves are a very subtle form of high-tech display the computing brains for the system needs to be kept somewhere, in this case a backpack contains the brains. Providing the processing power required, along with internet connection, video analysis, voice recognition and battery / power. Here at Highpants were not sure why Project Glass isn’t being driven by an Android tablet or smartphone, surely a quad core ARM processor could drive the glasses. Apparently the back-pack stayed near Serey the entire night.

Project Glass is still in it’s infancy, Google’s announcement this week has predominantly been an information gathering exercise, gauging the publics reaction. This weeks reaction will make for an interesting Monday meeting in Google HQ. Now if they could make the glasses using Corning’s Gorilla Glass we could have Project Gorilla Glasses.

Reference: Project Glass on Google+

Google Glasses: A New Way to Hurt Yourself (parody of Google’s Project Glass)