New Google Glass patent shows Google toying with hand-gestures to like, crop, and share
We saw Google’s wild and wacky plans for Google Glass back when a patent filing was uncovered a few weeks ago showing us a plethora of wearable Glass prototypes. Where patent filings don’t always lead to a final product, sometimes it’s just fun to take a peek inside the mad minds of the geniuses over at Google.
While functional in its current state, the vision or scope of what Glass could offer in the future is much more exciting. When talking candidly about Glass, I’ve often told friends that one day Glass would likely incorporate gestures for interacting with the OS. When opening a web page, how cool would it be to reach out your hand and simply pinch-to-zoom in thin air, instead of using the clunky Glass touchpad? If this newly discovered patent filing from Google takes off, looks like I could have been right on the money.
The filing shows us future versions of Glass (or possibly even current with a software update) that would be able to detect a user’s hand gestures. For instance, creating an “L” shape with the hand, a user could crop an image inside Glass. Another use case scenario is a heart shape gesture that could “like”, save, or share anything from the real world. Glass could even recognize an item, pulling up extra info, ratings, etc..
We can’t help but think all of this sounds a lot like a super charged Google Goggles — a feature/app many thought would debut with Glass, but apparently the tech just wasn’t there yet. Again, there’s no indication that functionality like gestures will ever make its way into Glass, but it’s clear over at Google, they’re certainly thinking about it.