Huffington Post – by Sara Gates
New Yorker Noah Zerkin was riding the subway this weekend when he came across a familiar face sporting an exciting new piece of technology. It was Google co-founderSergey Brin wearing Google’s augmented-reality “glasses.”
Brin, who has publicly shown off the company’s Project Glass headset many times since it debuted in April 2011, took the device with him for a ride on New York’s downtown 3 train on Sunday.
Zerkin, a self-professed augmented-reality enthusiast, captured the moment in a photo, which he posted to Twitter.
The device sits on the wearer’s ears and covers one eye with a translucent rectangle — about the size of a postage stamp — that transmits data about the wearer’s surroundings directly into his or her eye. In lieu of a touchscreen, certain swiping motions made on the side of the headset can be used to navigate app interfaces, while hands-free functionality lets the user capture photos and video and complete other tasks.
Zerkin’s subway encounter with Brin is not the first time the high-tech specs have been seen around the Big Apple.
Last week, Gothamist reported that a female Google employee wore the device to an East Village bar on a Friday night. Despite testing out the so-called Google “glasses” in public, the woman remained rather hush-hush on the project, refusing to let Gothamist’s reporter touch the tech or take a photo.
While Brin may not be the only person who has worn Project Glass on the New York subway, the rest of us will have to wait a while before we see daily commuters with Google-made frames of their own. Though the device is slated to ship out todevelopers later this year (for a whopping $1,500 a unit), Google aims to release a consumer version in 2014 for a price the company hopes will be less than $1,500.