In a video showing off the prowess of the new Project Astra app, the demonstrator asks Gemini, “remember where you saw my glasses?” Despite the fact that the object was not actually visible when asked, the AI effectively replied, “Yes, I do. Your glasses were on the table next to the red apple.” But these weren’t your standard visual aids. These glasses had a camera and some kind of visual interface on board!
The tester took their glasses and put them on and proceeded to ask the AI more questions about what they were looking at. It’s clear that the device has a camera that helps it pick up its surroundings, and we’ve been shown some kind of interface where the waveform moves to show it’s listening. On-screen captions also reflected the answer read aloud to the user. So if we’re tracking, it’s at least a microphone and a speaker, along with some kind of processor and battery to power everything.
We only got a brief glimpse of the wearable, but a few things became clear from the sneaky seconds. The glasses had a simple black frame and didn’t look like Google Glass at all. They didn’t look too bulky either.
It’s likely that Google isn’t ready to unveil a pair of glasses at I/O. He skipped right over the look of the wearable device and barely mentioned them, except to say that Project Astra and company’s vision of “universal agents” could come to devices like our phones or glasses. We don’t know much else at the moment, but if you’ve been mourning Google Glass or the company’s other failed wearables, this may yet offer some hope.
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