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"Celebrated fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg tried on Glass for the first time a few months ago at a conference that she attended with Sergey Brin. She immediately loved it and they agreed to bring Glass to New York Fashion Week. Diane is a champion for innovation and effortless design, so it's unsurprising that Glass fit seamlessly into her production. In the week leading up to her Spring 2013 show in New York, and during the show itself, everyone from stylists and models to Diane herself used Glass to capture never-before-seen footage of the creative process."

Education is already seeing some major changes in light of new, cutting-edge technologies. Students can now access educational information from virtually anywhere at any time, and mobile devices are influencing some to flip their classrooms, changing the educational experience altogether. While current technologies are making waves, further changes linked to upcoming technologies may be on the horizon. One of the most hyped and anticipated devices over the past year has been Google's soon-to-be-released glasses. These glasses will enable users to get real-time information about the places, people, and objects around them, right on the lens of the glasses. While it will be a long time before these glasses ever show up in the classroom (they currently cost $1,500 and are available only to developers), when they do, educators and students can expect to see some of these amazing changes to the educational experience.

My thoughts on Project Glass: first of all, it's vaporware. Announcing stuff two years in advance is just not a cool or smart move and that's the first thing that ticks me off. It reminds me of the Microsoft Courier, the dreams we had for the Palm Pre and every other product that seemed awesome when they announce it and then turns out to be shit when you can finally buy it, or gets discontinued before you even get a chance to get your hands on it.

Head-mounted wearable computers present a bit of an interface problem. Voice-based head-mounted systems impart the impression that a person is murmuring to him or herself, and accelerometer-based systems that rely on head movement make users look like they have a nervous tic. One solution to the head-mounted-computer user interface conundrum involves hand gestures. Enter a new Google patent that seems to be the search giant's answer to controlling its Project Glass augmented reality system. Titled, "wearable marker for passive interaction," the patented system, which just went public Tuesday, would use a reflective infrared identifier placed on a user's hand to track and identify the user's gestures.

Yet there's something intriguing about the concept of augmented reality, the notion of enhancing objects in the real world with virtual sounds and images and additional info. And when Google revealed earlier this year that it was developing glasses that will be part wearable computer, part digital assistant that flashes relevant data right before your eyes, augmented reality (AR) no longer seemed such a digital parlor trick. The geek gods had spoken. In fact, recent analysis by the London firm ABI Research concludes that the next big phase of AR-now largely played out on smartphones and tablets-will be through wearable tech. That's when the technology will become truly functional, when your glasses are able to tell you everything you want to know about the restaurants and stores on the block where you're walking.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Inside Google's secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain. There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own.

Oubliez les Google Glasses, voici "Sight". Dans ce court-métrage (en anglais), deux étudiants israéliens ont imaginé ce que serait notre quotidien si l'on portait des lentilles permettant de superposer une interface virtuelle à notre vue. Vous pourriez vous balader sur les réseaux sociaux, obtenir des rappels de rendez-vous, voire recevoir des informations sur ce qui reste dans votre frigo, le tout directement depuis votre rétine.  A mi-chemin entre le fantasme technologique de la réalité augmentée et le cauchemar orwellien (regardez la vidéo jusqu'au bout), Sight met également en lumière une autre tendance actuelle : celle de la "ludification". Avec de telles lentilles, tout devient un jeu, depuis la découpe des concombres... jusqu'à la drague.

"Augmented Reality, or AR, involves the projection of information onto our physical landscape through some form of assistive device, such as the heads-up displays (HUDs) used in many aircraft, the use of a mobile device with a camera to photograph a location and add information or the upcoming Google Goggles, which promise a wearable AR experience. "