The last time I heard about Glass was because someone got fined for driving while wearing them in California sometime last month.
But in this case, all they need to do is announce a price, release date, and all the improvements that the consumer version will have, and people will be interested. As long as there's no direct competition, the opportunity remains.
Anyway, is this even a bad thing? Presumably - hopefully - Google will take the natural groove that developers have found themselves in and use that to design the APIs that are missing/coming. It's not like the product is even close to being on the shelves.
You can't even argue that Google perhaps debuted Glass too early, because it's still an invite-only device. It's the chicken-egg problem with bootstrapping a new device ecosystem. Google needs testers and developers to finish the product, but testers and developers need a finished product to work with.
Also, I really wish they weren't so strict with their facial recognition ban. I'm useless in social situations because I'm terrible with faces (if I see someone out of the context I met them I will not recognize them). For someone like me, even if it was restricted to my own personal database and required approval of the person I was interacting with (NFC or BLE touch for instance), it would heavily level the social playing field.
"What I'm most fundamentally interested in is this idea of maximizing human potential," she said. "We could do expression recognition, and use it to teach autistic children how to recognize expressions." Another helpful scenario she described for facial recognition would be to help Alzheimer's patients remember people that they know they ought to recognize, but have forgotten."
Yeah, sure, I'm all for helping autistic children, but it's pretty damned obvious that non-invasive non-troubling uses of facial recognition on Glass are going to be the edge case rather than the rule.
