Your complete guide to Google Glass, soon to be London's hottest wearable tech

They’re not yet available in the UK but already Google’s smart specs are becoming London’s hottest tech. A test on Soho’s streets sees through the myths and clears up how you can avoid becoming a Glasshole

Using Google Glass feels a little akin to the new internet meme, whaling. Just as web-trendsters have been Vine-ing themselves launching backwards to the floor, after an afternoon with Google’s innovative wearable tech I have adopted the habits of a tetchy horse, throwing my head back at regular intervals. This is the Glass nod — the head action that activates this pair of high-tech glasses. It brings up the display above my right eye and waits for me to say “OK Glass,” and give a command. This could become the techno-tic of the future. 

Glass wearers are not yet common in London. The kit that lets you transpose some of the functions of a smartphone to your sightline is still some way off a UK launch and is not yet being marketed as a consumer device. Currently it’s meant only for a fairly select group of testers (or “Explorers” as Google calls them) who have to have a US credit card and zip code to apply.

Nevertheless, we’ve seen Kelly Osbourne and Diane Von Furstenberg showing them off and Google boss Sergey Brin seems to have them permanently fixed to his face. Moving on from their initial geeky incarnation you can now get Glass as sunglasses, with prescription lenses or hipster frames.

In January developers at Central Saint Martins made headlines with their Glance app that, with Glass, will display what your partner sees while you’re having sex. Last month Virgin Atlanticstaff began greeting their Upper Class passengers at Heathrow airport wearing Glass.

As I left Google HQ, Glassed up for an afternoon exploring London, a man almost immediately approached me with familiarity to say, “I see you’re wearing Glass. Which way is the Google office, please?” Glass may not be commonplace on the Tube as yet, but London certainly is hyper-aware of what is to come. Or so we might think.

Last week, restaurant group Corbin and King, which owns top London establishments The Wolseley and The Delaunay, told the Evening Standard that it would not allow people to use Glass in its restaurants because “other diners cannot tell whether the Glass is recording them or not”. Though it’s surely rare that it has had to put this policy into practice, the group is ostensibly jumping on the bandwagon of some San Franciscan bars and restaurants which have made the same ruling. The assumption is that Glass wearers (or Glassholes as they’re dubbed by dissenters) are secretly filming everything and everyone they see.

source: www.standard.co.uk