Google has finally indicated that it is stepping up the game for its Project Glass with two hackathons being held in San Francisco and New York across a duration of two days on 28/29 January and 1/2 February. The events, which are being called “Glass Foundry”, will allow developers to get to know the Mirror API and start developing for Google Glass with the help of easy access being made available to a number of Google Engineers at the events. The API will be REST based and provide the ability to exchange data while interacting with the user. The participants will also be provided a device to try at the events in order to help them understand how it really works and get an approximation of the kind of experience that Google is trying to achieve. The second day will involve a set of demos with some “special guest judges” being present at the event. The deadline for registering for this event is on January 18 and obviously entries will be quite limited, though the invites are only limited to people who bought the alpha version of the device which was available for $1500 earlier. In an interview to IEEE Spectrum, Babak Parviz, who heads the Google Glass project said, “This is not a laptop or a smartphone. It’s an entirely new platform. So how people interact with it and what people do with it is totally new territory. We’ve explored multiple things. We’ve taken pictures and done search and other things with this device.
But we hope that when we ship this to developers, other people will also figure out what this very powerful platform is able to do.” He added that before shipping the device commercially, they aim to be ready with a Cloud based API which will be similar to the one used for Google Calendar and E-Mail services.
