Designing and Developing for Google Glass: Thinking Differently for a New Platform

by Allen Firstenberg, Jason Salas

Overview

Creating apps for Google Glass is more involved than simply learning how to navigate its hardware, APIs, and SDK. You also need the right mindset. While this practical book delivers the information and techniques you need to build and deploy Glass applications, it also helps you to think for Glass by showing you how the platform works in, and affects, its environment.

In three parts—Discover, Design, and Develop—Glass pioneers guide you through the Glass ecosystem and demonstrate what this wearable computer means for users, developers, and society as a whole. You’ll learn how to create rich functionality for a consumer technology that’s radically different than anything currently available.

• Learn the Five Noble Truths of great Glassware design
• Understand the Glass ecosystem and learn why it’s different
• Sidestep Glass’s societal concerns in your projects
• Learn how Glass adapts to the user’s world, rather than the other way around
• Avoid poor design by identifying Glassware antipatterns
• Build cloud services with the Google Mirror API
• Use the Glass Development Kit to develop client applications
• Submit your project for review in the MyGlass directory

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491946459
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/04/2015
Pages:	401
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

By day, Allen is a Senior Project Engineer at http://spiders.com/ where he has been instrumental in creating websites and mobile apps for companies and organizations from the American Booksellers Association to the National Science Foundation. By night he dons his super-coder cloak and creates tools, software, and tutorials to help people share their stories and improve their digital lives.



Allen is a https://developers.google.com/experts/members/[Google Developer Exper , recognized by Google as one of the leaders in the developer community for Google+ and Google Glass, and is a Glass Explorer and Pioneer, having attended the New York Glass Foundry event run by Google in early 2013. Appearing on the YouTube shows https://www.youtube.com/user/mcdermottreport-feature=watch and https://plus.google.com/103030555291293016225/posts (which he co-hosts), he is one of the first to heap praise on good ideas, one of the most brutal to criticize problems, and is relentlessly focused on helping people understand the grand vision. In the early days of the World Wide Web, he created one of the first collaborative websites, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addventure[Addventure], in an effort to push the boundaries and explore what could be done with the new media that was beginning to evolve.



Allen holds a BS in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.



He was inspired to join the Glass Explorers program when he realized how intimate and personal Glass would be, yet at the same time be inherently social. His goal is to help people find the experiences with Glass that can be done by nothing else on the market today, to watch people look at each other as they discover new ways to play games together with Glass, and to watch (and record) his son’s face as the two of them roll in laughter during a tickle fight.



Allen is on https://plus.google.com/101852559274654726533/posts and http://www.linkedin.com/pub/allen-s-firstenberg/0/130/950. He blogs about life and other four-letter words at http://iaflw.com/.

A software developer, marketer, broadcaster, sportswriter and filmmaker, Jason enjoys perpetual summer living on the island of Guam. He fell in love with the Web the moment he first got online in 1994, seeing it as the world’s biggest toy, and began helping people embrace the Internet before shifting his focus to content development and ultimately to designing data-driven systems. In the last few years he’s been concentrating on Google Glass, Hangout extensions, HTML5 games, and Chromecast apps. Since 1999 he’s worked at http://kuam.com, where he runs the company’s R&D group and also co-anchors the nightly news http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIlG6gCPSt8[(no, really)].



Jason was twice named a Microsoft MVP for his involvement with the ASP.NET community, is a four-time winner of the Edward R. Murrow Award for cutting-edge web development in the news industry, and is constantly interacting in Google+ Communities for Glass users and developers. He’s served as technical editor for a book on Microsoft Hailstorm, has written for .NET Magazine, MSDN and Wrox, and authored an e-book about the trials and tribulations of a semi-pro football league. He holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Guam and an MBA with emphasis in technology management from the University of Phoenix. He’s also an adjunct professor of MIS and business at the University of Guam and a member of the Football Writers Association of America.



He wants to make good on his public promise to be the first man on the planet to do three distinct things with Glass: host a Hangout On Air from Epcot Center, call play-by-play for a game while broadcasting his POV video to give viewers a behind-the-scenes look at a live sports production, and direct a stage version of _Hamlet_ with all actors performing the tragedy of the troubled Prince of Denmark through their own first-person perspectives.



Jason is online at http://jasonsalas.com.