google glass spotted in new york city

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:

  1. This Glass user works in Google X and is on vacation in NYC from California
  2. He works at Google’s New York offices and Google has expanded testing of Glass outside of Google X
  3. 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.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."

  • What about just travelling a lot between the two places? I mean, that’s pretty common with big companies if he’s in that kind of position. Who knows, maybe he was over at NYC to give a presentation about google glass to some other Google people.