Back to photokina and to our encounter, and after a minute or two we discovered that the stranger standing in front of us wearing the Glass goggles is actually named Marc Levoy. A quick search in Google later on helped us discover that Mr. Levoy is actually A Stanford Professor of computer science who is on a year of absence from the university to pursue a project for no other than… Google of course (we didn't ask which project and he didn't tell). Professor Levoy actually worked with Google on a few very important projects in the past, some of them are probably familiar to many of you including [being a co-designer of] the Google book scanner and he apparently had more than a hand in the development of Google's Street View project (which is a huge success and we actually used it ourselves during our time in Germany).

We had a quick conversation and after we took his picture wearing the Glass we asked naively if we can use it (we actually meant the image we took – which eventually didn't turn out very well so we used the one photographer and Google employee Chris Chabot took that you can see above – he also shot Sergey Brin's pictures with the Glass which you can see below). Initially Professor Levoy mumbled something about getting permission from Google PR but a few seconds later he remembered that Google actually had a new policy regarding the Glass and a moment later – and to our great surprise – we found ourselves wearing the Glass (apparently he was though we were asking if we can use them and not his picture – a fair assumption giving our initial audacity in approaching him).

It might be pushing it a bit to talk about our "experience" with the Glass. After all we had them on for only a few brief moments, but we can say a few things:

More than we were impressed with the prototype that we used briefly (it's still about a year or so from reaching the market according to Google, so it's completely understandable), we were actually taken with the vision behind Glass. It's one thing to read about it or see a video of someone supposedly using them, but it's something completely different to have it on and see a person in front of you take your picture and send it online without you even being aware of it (for better or worse).

Glass is a revolution. It's hard to say at this point if the first commercial version will be a success. To be really useful a lot of work will have to go into designing a UI which will be simple, fast and intuitive to use with a small screen and very limited control – not a simple task even for a giant like Google. However in a time where we see Google focusing on what it sees as its core businesses (closing down less popular services), it seems that Glass is being pushed forward hard.
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This should not come as a surprise to anybody – Glass has the potential to change the way we take pictures and videos (it might not replace a pro camera, but it certainly can replace your mobile phone camera and maybe even your compact camera). Of course Glass is much more than that – it's an augmented reality device which can add a digital layer of reality on top of what we see, adding a lot of useful info from GPS navigation to comparing prices of products we see in a shop online in real time and even getting info on people we meet from the web at the moment we see them.

There will be a lot of technical hurdles to go through as well as social and maybe even legal ones before Glass and similar technologies become a part of our lives, but one thing we know for sure – we would like to shoot and broadcast live from photokina 2014 with a commercial version of Glass.

* This article was written in cooporation with MegaPixel.co.il.