Google Glass: What you can and can’t do
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Don’t bother hunting for pornography with Google’s new wearable gizmo. There’s nary a naughty bit in sight -- not through the rose-colored world of Google Glass, anyway. But what you can see is a pretty incredible glimpse of the future.
A PG-13 glimpse, that is; the adult-film industry is taking a pass on Glass, for now.
"We've decided to take a wait-and-see approach to Google Glass,” Steven Hirsch, founder and co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, told FoxNews.com. “We want to see how quickly our target audience chooses to adapt it before we make any decision to move ahead."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Peter Acworth, CEO of San Francisco-based Kink.com, told the Silicon Valley Business Journal that Glass "opens up new opportunities for reality-based films. You could film picking up someone at a bar and taking them home. It takes the whole genre of POV and reality productions one stage further."
A company spokesman told FoxNews.com it doesn’t plan to act on that vision, however: “No explicit plans yet,” Kink’s Michael Stabile told FoxNews.com.
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What Glass will do is remarkable, however -- and it’s great for kids for now, thanks to what appears to be parent-friendly, “moderate” search filter settings and this laid-back attitude from the sex industry.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}While Glass often presents search results as text, for example, it will readily show you pictures. To find images, search for “pictures of ducks” or “images of dinosaurs” and a colorful row of icons will fill your vision rather than typography.
And Glass shows videos beautifully, although for now, it’s just those you’ve taken yourself. The gadget lets you upload them to Google+, along with all the images you’ve taken, and share them easily with groups or everyone.
What of YouTube, you ask? Install one of the first apps released for Glass, from independent YouTube network Fullscreen, for the ability to share videos directly on YouTube. With Fullscreen BEAM, you can upload to your channel privately or share the link to it on Twitter, the company says.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“Our engineering team loves building better experiences for digital video creators every day,” wrote Drew Baumann, founding engineer for the company, in a post announcing the software.
But you can’t browse YouTube videos with that app, nor search directly with the search engine built into Glass. Nor can you watch movie trailers. Or browse your Facebook news feed. Or visit much of the web.
Indeed, Glass is fairly limited at present, until the developers currently playing with it build the sort of robust apps that made smartphones so darn powerful.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}But they have wonderful, wonderful ideas.
Take Andrew Vanden Heuvel, for example, the physics professor who gave a high-school science class at South Christian in Grand Rapids, Mich., a proton’s-eye view of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva -- the same place where scientists recently may have found the long sought Higgs Boson.
Google flew Vanden Heuvel to Geneva, where he ran a digital “hangout” with the entire class -- live from within the 17-mile long cutting-edge science project.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“I had a marathon tour of the Large Hadron Collider. We saw two of the large detectors, the huge tunnel … we really did make a live connection, so the kids could see what I saw,” Vanden Heuvel told FoxNews.com.
While online-only institutions such as the Khan Academy are transforming education, Vanden Heuvel thinks experiences like the one he and his kids shared at CERN may signal an equally big transformation on teaching.
“In a lot of ways I’m living in the future of education. For me it’s a very relevant tool,” he said. Vanden Heuvel has been posting bite-size science videos to YouTube, thanks to Glass. Watch his first few at stembite.com.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“I see science everywhere I look,” he said.
But until the apps arrive, Google Glass is more promise than powerful. And by the time they arrive, the porn may show up too. It only stands to reason that the most common uses for the web will propagate to Glass, as they did for smartphones and other connected gadgets.
“We are not aware of any adult applications for Google Glass, but Urban Dictionary’s RULE34 states: if it exists there is porn on it," Tony Farrow of ICM Registry, the operators of the .XXX domain, told FoxNews.com.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}For now, curse at Google and you’ll see a cleaned up, kid-friendly version of your query: “Web results for what the F*** Google Glass.”
And for now, that's probably okay.