Getting involved with latest technologies is a common thing here at Making Sense. As professionals you can say that it’s our obligation to know what happens in software and hardware and yes, you’re right. But, that is only a percentage of the truth. We are users and consumers of the latest things on the market. We want to know, we want to use, we want to discover. We are developers.
We want to discover
At the beginning of this year, the company gave us the opportunity to develop software for a generous list of really new devices and gadgets. Google Glasses immediately caught my attention but I have to admit that the Leap Motion device too. The rules were simple:
- Choose a device
- Form a team (or not)
- Define a scope
- Develop something
Breaking news through the Glass
When I finally figured out that I wanted to try out the Google Glasses, I started to think about what I could do. At that moment, Rosario Mensi joined as a developer partner. After a long list of outstanding-dream-like-applications we chose a simple (and possible) one: a glassware to display breaking news and let users stay informed any time they wanted. That was the idea, an experiment using Glass, a Glassperiment.
Don’t lose your mind
Counting on two months to get a prototype or at least something working, we started to get deeper into the Glass world. Unfortunately that didn’t go very well because of the lack of documentation, forums, examples, and community in general.
That was the first thing learned, how important becomes the community in these days. Also there is no emulator and the Glasses took us a lot of time to get recognized by the OS and Eclipse IDE – If you are interested, go to this page where I explain how to sort out these kinds of difficulties without losing your mind.
Inspiration: those who gave birth to computer science
Some thoughts came to my mind through the process. How intelligent were the people behind the computer science in the beginning? I mean, those ones were lonely, without the information that we us have access today and they figured out how to solve very complex stuff. They didn’t have to only code, they had to build too. My congratulations go to all of them. We owe them much.
After a month of fights with the environment, I finally get a “Hello Glass” working and things begin to smooth out. I start coding and the result is a glassware that shows breaking news in a card at given appointed intervals. Of course there is a lot that we could do or add to make it reliable. For that case, I’m sharing the code through GitHub and you are welcome to just read it or continue glassperimenting. Also, if you want to see some screenshots or know more about the project, please visit my page.
I’m not sure if this is the right time to start using Google Glasses or a similar technology. It feels a bit weird when wearing them to be honest. However, I think it would be great to find a way to use this technology for the good or for helping people. Maybe this is the tip of the iceberg regarding something better? As I said, I just don’t know.
What Are Your Thoughts?
We welcome your feedback on the comments section. You can also get in touch with us by filling out the form in the Contact Section or by emailing us at hello@makingsense.com; we’ll be glad to advise you, regardless of your development needs.