News on connected glasses

Google Glass Can Now Teach You Morse Code in Four Hours

By Brandon Bailey

Have you ever wanted to learn how to use Morse Code? Well, now you can thanks to a modified Google Glass headset. Designed back in 1836, Morse Code played a vital role in early electronic communication, aviation and warfare. Today however, it has been replaced with bits and bytes to send messages over long distances, but it is still used among amateur radio operators or people with motion disabilities.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have reportedly built a system that can teach people Morse code while they are focusing on something else entirely. This can be achieved by a set of modified Google Glass, which has a built-in speaker and bone-conduction transducer that simulates the experience of being tapped on the side of the head.

The teaching process included participants playing games, while the speaker in the device named a letter and then heard the Morse code signal for it. Half of the group were also given taps representing the dots and dashes of Morse code between their temple and their ear. This resulted in those who got the taps were 94 percent accurate when writing a sentence that included every letter of the alphabet, and 98 percent accurate writing out the codes for each letter while those who didn't get the taps were accurate only half the time, all under four hours.

Similar tests have been conducted before which have taught people braille and how to play the piano, and now the next step is to see if it can be used to teach how to type on the QWERTY keyboard. According to Thad Starner, who carries out the experiments, this might not result in people rushing to learn Morse code, but "It shows that passive haptic learning lowers the barrier to learn text-entry methods -- something we need for smartwatches and any text-entry that doesn't require you to look at your device or keyboard. »

SNAPCHAT SPECTACLES ARE HERE AND THEY ARE RIDICULOUSLY FUN

by Bryan Bishop

When Snap, Inc. announced earlier this year that it had created a pair of video-recording sunglasses called Spectacles, it was a little hard to get a handle on just what the end result would be. Snap was new to the hardware game, and more ambitious wearables like Google Glass had been expensive, niche failures. But yesterday a limited number of Spectacles went on sale, offered through a yellow pop-up vending machine near the company’s original headquarters in Venice, California — and we finally got a chance to see what the company had come up with.

Spectacles work with both Android and iOS devices — I was only able to test them with an iPhone — but pairing is a best-case dream scenario. The user simply looks at the scannable Snapchat ghost icon in the app with the Spectacles, presses the single button on the top left, and the process handles itself magically from there.

But enough about the workflow details, I hear you saying; what’s it actually like to record and watch snaps recorded with Spectacles? Here’s the great news: both are incredibly fun, and will only become more so as people get used to how they should actually use Spectacles. Given that Spectacles are sunglasses — and relatively unobtrusive ones at that — there’s nothing distracting or odd about having them on in the first place. And capturing is so dead simple it lets you grab moments without even having the chance to overthink or plan. It promotes a kind of spontaneous, in-the-moment capture that the ritual of grabbing a phone and launching an app really can’t match.

But for now, it’s time to play, experiment, and create new things. Adopting new technologies is easy when they’re actually fun to play with, and at $129.95 this technology should be fairly accessible for those who can find the vending machine robot. In an area where trying too much has been the death knell for too many products, Snapchat is keeping things very simple and streamlined with Spectacles. The polish is in the details, but it’s all designed to create a fun, frictionless zone for people to do one very important thing: create and share.

Resume:

The first article, is all about a modified google glass headset, who permit the users to learn morse code in less than 4hours, thanks to researchers at the Georgia institute of technology. It is just incredible what those google glasses can offer us because they  are tunable. We can think about new updates, permitting educational lessons or live demonstrating how to use something. It is an amazing technology digest for us. The second article is a lot more fun and creative. Snapchat one of the biggest app in the world just want to make us smile when they brings out this wearable video-recording sunglasses. How it works ? Connected by bluetooth with any phones and using just one button, it lets us play with our eyes and permit this POV effect bringing amazing shots. Spectacles went on sale last week, offered through a yellow pop-up vending machine near the company’s original headquarters in Venice, California. 

I really like those two concept because they just want to help us look differently at our world. Google glass can be very interesting to use by helping us in our daily task and Spectacle glass just want to wake up our creative sense.