Goog wants your eyeball - futuristic $1,500 goggles coming sooner
Eric Mack, reporting on CNET, wrote that Google has accelerated its rollout of Google Glass, and will introduce them by the end of this year.
Google originally targeted 2014 for a consumer release when it revealed Project Glass last year, but the time frame has seemingly sped up in recent months, what with developer hackathons in San Francisco and New York and this week's announcement that people looking to put Glass to creative use could go through an application process to pre-order the augmented reality specs for $1,500.
Some early users have mixed reviews. There is a reports that they cause headaches as users try to focus on the heads-up display and look where they are walking.
Google is reported to be planning to open its own retail stores in a bid to let the public experience Google hardware before buying. With fewer electronics retailers there are fewer opportunities for companies to showroom their products.
It follows Apple's successful retail strategy. However, radical new concepts such as Google Glass also require quite a bit of evangelism and Steve Jobs was superb in the role of showing all the ways that people could use Apple technologies, he emphasized the cultural aspects of the products far more than the technology itself.
Google doesn't have any charismatic senior executives to evangelise Google Glass or its other products. As its product family grows Google will find it challenging to sell its gizmos and gadgets to a general public. Geek love (see above photo) is important, but it is a tiny market.
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