For all you early adopters out there, the future is now. Picture a phone that you wear on your face. That phone brings up any information you might look up on a smartphone right before your eyes, literally. Kinda seems like something out of a sci-fi movie, right?

Wrong. Enter Google’s Project Glass, an exercise in a growing field known as augmented reality. What’s augmented reality, you ask? It is basically where information is constantly fed to you about your ever-changing surroundings, including locations, people, objectives, and so on (e.g. the types of things sci-fi video games and movies are made of). It’s a bit hard to explain exactly what Project Glass is exactly, except to say that it does the following:

As you can see, we’re talking a microphone, camera, micro display, and browser, and the whole system is voice activated. Is this really the future of the smartphone?

We all know that when the guys at Google get their minds set on anything, it’s usually only a matter of time. Of course, first they need to address the vision thing. The lenses need to actually work for their original purpose: helping people with less than 20/20 vision see clearly. They won’t do anyone any good if they can’t do that.

Next, you’ve got to be able to turn that display off when you need to. If random icons and text are just popping up in your face throughout the day, it may be harder to drive, carry on a face-to-face conversation, or pay attention to… anything.

Also, how do you keep other people locked out of it? Say you put it down for some reason and someone picks it up. Does that person have access to all your information?

Better yet, how do you dial or add contacts? No matter how much voice recognition you’ve got, some things are better left typed or keyed in.

Of course, this begs another very important question. What the heck will privacy look like if Google can put whatever it wants before our very eyes? Seems like the ads (make no mistake, there will be ads) will be extremely personal, sort of like this.

The answers to most of these questions are unclear as of yet, but we’re willing to bet that the eyewear will go the route of the Bluetooth headset, meaning they will have to accompany actual smartphones – at least when they are initially released some time in the future.

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