Recently, Google has come forward with an exciting new venture they call Project Glass. While the project exploded when Google recently released a concept video of how the "Google goggles" might possibly work, New York Times reported back in February (despite lack of comment from a Google spokesperson) that Google was set to begin selling the revolutionary new headgear by the end of 2012.
Gaming Industry giant, Valve Software has recently caused quite a stir in gaming news by posting job listings for hardware engineers, stating that they are looking for individuals experienced in Hardware design, prototyping, testing, and production across a wide range of platforms." In light of the recent "Project Glass" news, it came as no surprise that when Michael Abrash, a game developer and representative from Steam, stated the slight possibility of a wearable gaming device a great deal of excitement was caused on gaming and technology forums across the net.
Although Abrash has tried to keep the hype to a minimum by releasing this statement to The Verge, the concept of a wearable gaming device is still an exciting prospect;
To be clear, this is R&D – it doesn’t in any way involve a product at this point, and won’t for a long while, if ever – so please, no rumors about Steam glasses being announced at E3. It’s an initial investigation into a very interesting and promising space, and falls more under the heading of research than development. The Valve approach is to do experiments and see what we learn – failure is fine, just so long as we can identify failure quickly, learn from it, and move on – and then apply it to the next experiment. The process is very fast-moving and iterative, and we’re just at the start. How far and where the investigation goes depends on what we learn.
Even if what Abrash says is true, and Valve never ends up monetizing on a wearable computing/gaming device, that fact that two major companies are currently working on a similar project makes this idea all the more plausible. Will wearable computing be the next big thing? If so, does this mean we will be just a little bit closer to taking the next big technological leap?
