Attending Glass Durham, Google's First Project Glass Tour Stop

American Tobacco Campus in Durham for Google's first stop on a tour around the country to demo Project Glass. After a 45 minute wait, I, along with 9 others, was led to a table of Chromebook Pixels where I filled out a photo release form. I was pretty surprised by how laid back and how few people were inside. If they wanted it to feel relaxed, they did a pretty good job.

Two Google Employees gave an informal demo to our group. One of the employees was demonstrating Glass and the other employee held an Android tablet. The Glass display was being screencast to the Android tablet. Unfortunately, the wifi didn't seem up to the task of providing internet to all of the Glass devices, so they weren't able to demo much.  They tried to demo telling Glass that they were hungry (OK, Glass, Google I'm Hungry), telling us how it would find nearby places to eat, but the internet connection wasn't even good enough for the speech recognition to work. The third time they tried it "I'm Hungry" appeared on the screen, but it couldn't fetch any results. From that point, on they just focused on showing off the camera and video capabilities and described how the rest of the features worked.

We were then led over to a one of several stations to try Glass out for ourselves. Two more Googlers distributed the devices to us and helped anyone that was having issues fitting them and angling the screen. In the 7 minutes I had with the device, I couldn't get any internet based features to work.  There seems to be built in voice recognition to say "Google", "Take a picture", "Get directions to", but once it prompts you for the what or where it seemed to be stuck trying to upload the request to Google voice recognition servers. I was able to look through the feed which had a few CNN articles, but the articles wouldn't load either. That being said, another person in my group told me that one of their searches actually worked enough for them to be able to see some results.

I was very impressed with the quality of the display, and the laid back atmosphere, but it was pretty disappointing that wifi issues prevented me from being able to properly demo Glass. I have no idea if this was an issue all day, but it was the whole time I was there.