A friend spotted someone wearing a prototype Google Glass HMD in New York City and shot me this photo. You can see that the Glass unit has prescription lenses, something that hasn’t been seen in public until now. This is one of several other styles that we’ve seen, including sunglasses and no lenses.
It’s interesting to see this in NYC; Project Glass is the creation of the company’s semi-secret ‘Google X Lab’ which is likely located close to Google headquarters in California. The company does have offices nationally (including New York) and internationally, but it is unknown if the company has distributed Google Glass prototypes outside of the Google X Lab.
There are three possibilities in my mind:
- This Glass user works in Google X and is on vacation in NYC from California
- He works at Google’s New York offices and Google has expanded testing of Glass outside of Google X
- He works at Google’s New York offices and also works remotely with Google X
Based on where the photo was taken, very near Google’s New York offices, I’d put my money on the latter two options.
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Google Glass is expected to be released sometime in 2013. At Google’s annual ‘I/O’ developer conference back in June 2012, the company offered pre-orders for Google Glass ‘Explorer Edition’ for $1500. Only U.S. citizens in attendance could pre-order the Explorer Edition which is expected to arrive early in 2013.
