Designing and Developing for Google Glass (2015)

Prologue

Most logical people would probably come to the conclusion that attempting to write a book for a product not yet released to market and with next to no public information available about it is, well, how can we best say this…stupid. But that’s precisely the challenge we took on when proposing this book to O’Reilly, as an extension of our faith and optimism about the exciting new realm of wearable computing and the implementation of it within Google Glass.

Writing this material was a particularly challenging project, to say the least. We were tasked with not only authoring a book within an incredibly compressed timeframe, but with extremely little information about the new platform with which to work. Google’s steadfast commitment to not letting details about the product leak out made getting details about timelines, specifications, and API capabilities quite tough. But our symbiotic optimism about Glass and our unique dichotomy—Allen being a coder who can write, Jason a writer who can code—carried us through this labor of love.

By the same token, the staggered way that information was disseminated as the product neared its glorious launch made writing this book a constant torrent of rewrites, tweaks, updates, and deletions. Written over a period of nearly two full years, the book has been expanded from its original 12 chapters to as many as 19, then pared back down to 15.

Due to numerous evolutions, several of the chapters have effectively been completely rewritten numerous times. And with information made public teetering back and forth between topics governing marketing, engineering, technical specs, and product philosophy, it made for a wildly anachronistic writing process.

But that, as they say, was half the fun.

At the end of the day, we wrote this book as much for our own edification as we did for the Glass community, in its current membership and with scores more to come.

For just as Googlers (in)famously have their “dogfooding” practice of internally testing new technologies, we wanted to ensure we knew exactly what Glass was all about and what it can do for us as well as for society and bring that to the people.

We hope you thoroughly enjoy this book as much as we did putting it together!