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"Could there be a less expensive Google Glass competitor coming soon? GlassUp aims to give customers an alternative to Google's connected glasses with its own pair of augmented reality specs. Italian company GlassUp was recently added to crowdfunding site Indiegogo and has already raised nearly $25,000 (of its $150,000 goal). Similar to Google Glass, the eyewear works with your smartphone and makes it easy to see emails, text messages, Facebook updates and news right in front of your eyes. Its maker, Gianluigi Tregnaghi, says he created GlassUp two years ago - before Google ever announced its Glass product."

"TechRadar has had time with the Google Glass Explorer so you can find plenty more information right there. But what exactly is Google Glass? Why is it attracting all this attention and what are the implications - both good and bad - of having a Google-eye view of the world?"

"Humanity is about to undertake a bold experiment. If all goes as Google hopes, many of us will be strapping on Google Glasses later this year. The post-PC era in effect since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010 could give way to a the wearable computing era prompted by Glass. But what will that do to society? What will it do to our brains?"

"After watching surgeons perform these experiments, it is chilling to watch the Google Glass promotional video showing a cyclist riding between cars in heavy New York City traffic, while being bombarded with head-up navigational data. Our attention is a resource that is extremely limited in supply and instinctively overestimated. Inevitably - as with mobile phone use while driving - accidents will occur and we will be left to legislate use after a string of tragedies. The biggest challenge with Google Glass and similar devices is us. When we divert our gaze to our smart phones, we do so consciously and alter our thoughts and actions, hopefully in a safe way, to compensate. If information is to be projected directly in front of your eyes, it needs to be filtered to avoid accidents."

"This week I gave five speeches while wearing it. I passed through airports four times (two more in a couple of hours). I let hundreds of people try my Google Glass. I have barely taken it off since getting it other than to sleep. Here's my review after having Google Glass for two weeks:"

This infographic from Droid-Life.com gives an outline on some of the inner workings of Google's newest and most ambitious pet project, Google Glass. The graphic shows that a small projector projects an image through a prism, which puts the image directly on the user's retina, creating a small layer over the reality in the background. The "Google Glass" component's position on the frame is also adjustable, making the display layer able to be positioned in various areas within the user's field of vision.

"That will be the collective mindset of students taking "Glass Journalism," a new course slated for the fall semester at the University of Southern California, where students will be tasked with thinking up new ways for journalists to tell stories using augmented reality and Google Glass."

By the end of this year, our society will undergo a most peculiar form of societal change -- and it will involve a lot of strife and conflict. The cause? Google (GOOG_) Glasses.

"Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been yakking about Google Glass for more than two years. Yet until this week, we didn't know even the most basic facts about the platform. Google spilled some beans in an earnings call this week. The company also published facts about the hardware, software and licensing. And finally, users started receiving actual units, and have been blabbing about them on social media."

"Glass is the first step past the smartphone era, into a time where it's entirely possible that peripherals such as Glass are going to be used more and more to allow interaction with the computer in consumers' pockets in different ways. Think of it this way: your future children are likely to consider your Nexus 4 or iPhone 5 to be their Commodore 64 when they're older. It's hard to imagine a world where we see a user interface in our eyes but it's also not that far off."

"For the past two months, I've been the only teacher in the world to have Google Glass -- the most highly anticipated (and intensely coveted) technology to emerge in years. How did I get this incredible opportunity? Let me explain . . ."

Look at the videos and it's hard not to be impressed by the technologies incorporated in Glass. Think about it for five minutes, though, and it's hard not to be alarmed by what they might mean.

Hayley Tsukayama was prepared for the glasses to be buggy, and maybe even cause tension headaches. But what she wasn't prepared for was the attention.

The reaction to Google's latest gadget has been a mix of wild excitement and deep apprehension

"A blog to document my use of Google Glass, inspired by suggestions I received from teachers and kids around the world. "

"My team wrote an app at a medical hackathon called MedRef for Glass. The app lets you find and create patient folders by voice, add photo and voice notes, view previous notes, and also find patient folders by facial recognition! Very exciting."

"If you go by the headlines, the iPhone 5S and Google Glass were the big technology stories of 2013, and Twitter's IPO was the event of the year. The coverage of Glass focused mostly on its privacy implications - not its ability to change the world. And iPhone and Twitter were just more of the same. So we could end the year really disappointed because nothing dramatic seems to have happened on the technology front. But look again, at the stories we missed. So much happened, in fact, that I believe we have set the stage for the transformation of entire industries"

"The education sector is just beginning to experiment with, develop, and implement wearable technologies, though the potential applications are significant and vast. Smart jewelry or other accessories could alert students working in chemical laboratories to hazardous conditions, while wearable cameras can instantly capture hundreds of photographs or data about a user's surroundings on an offsite geology dig that can be later accessed via email or other online application."

"Sight, a brilliant and disturbing short sci-fi film by Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo, imagines a world in which Google Glass-inspired apps are everywhere. "