Since Google’s announcement of Project Glass, the company has remained quite silent on their augmented reality glasses project. We saw Project Glass in an interview with Charlie Rose back in April, but that was nothing compared to Google’s latest demo. At the annual Google I/O conference, the company decided to take things to the extreme by equipping a team of skydivers with Google Glass.
It was a pretty amazing demo given all that could go wrong. Sergey Brin was live on stage in front of a few thousand people at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco. Above the convention center was a zeppelin full of skydivers wearing wingsuits, parachutes, and Google Glass. All of the jumpers were streaming live in a Google+ hangout that was shown on stage. Brin initiated the action by saying that the lead diver had a Glass prototype that needed to make it’s way into Brin’s hand to show the crowd. At this point, a team of jumpers leap from the plane, wingsuited toward the Moscone Center, then deployed their parafoils to land on the building. The prototype unit still needed to make it’s way from the roof, so it was handed off to a team of bikers, all of which were also wearing Glass and streaming it live on stage through a Google+ hangout, which skillfully ramped up onto a tall section of the Center, then back down on the other side of it. From here the package was passed to a repelling team (also Glass equipped) who repelled down the side of the building onto the same floor as the stage where Brin was standing. A final pass to more bikers had the prototype cycled through the convention center, through the audience, and finally up onto the stage to be handed to Brin. This impressive series of stunts was all done live and culminated with all of the athletes eventually making their way to the stage, welcomed by a huge round of applause from the audience.
After the stunt, the Google Glass team spoke briefly on stage about the glass project (I’ll be dedicating a separate post to new Google Glass details revealed at Google I/O, expect that soon).
CNET has a video of the portion of the day one keynote where this all took place, check it out:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxmbbtuRszA]
The complexity involved in pulling this off live is quite daunting. The day after the initial jump, Google did another love demonstration; this time Brin gave a behind-the-scenes tour of the operation:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrcy3m3rPGM]
And last but not least, Google released a more cinematic version of the jump which I presume was an earlier test jump:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh-liQDE3cM]
